American Historical Ephemera and Photography, Featuring African Americana

Two (2) 10 3/4 x 8 1/2 in. silver gelatin photographs and three (3) 9 1/2 x 7 in. silver gelatin photographs (some edgewear, slight abrasions). Ink inscriptions identifying subjects on verso of three images. Two images with handwritten attribution to "E.H. Wiggins / Paris" and another with "photo d' Eddy Wiggins."

Subjects include Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), Jimmy Rushing (1901-1972), Guy Lafitte (1927-1998), Ray Charles (1930-2004), Leroy Cooper (1928-2009), and Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996).

The life and career of African American photographer Eddy Wiggins remains little explored despite the fact that he used his lens to document some of the most famous African American musicians and vocalists of the twentieth century. According to records of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Wiggins was born in New Orleans in 1904 (other sources cite his birth in Mississippi). French author Gilles LeRoy's 2008 book Eddy Wiggins. Le Noir et le Blanc. provides some biographical background, indicating that Wiggins moved from New Orleans to Chicago as a young man hoping to escape the violence and racism of the south. He left Chicago in 1933 moving to Paris as a correspondent for the prominent African American newspaper The Chicago Defender. He then covered the Parisian jazz scene for the newly founded French jazz magazine Jazz Hot. Following World War II, he served as a photographer and jazz correspondent for several American magazines, working with some of the greatest artists of the time. His photographs depict the lives of legendary African American artists in Paris, including candid moments backstage in concert halls such as Paris's famed concert venue, L'Olympia.