About the Artist
Carol Friedman's photographs have been featured in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times, Gentleman's Quarterly, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Camera Arts, and The London Times, and appear on the covers of numerous biographies and memoirs. Her classic portraits of singers and musicians may be seen on hundreds of jazz, soul, and classical album and CD covers, and are held in private collections here and abroad. Friedman is the recipient of numerous design and photography awards including the 2025 Gordon Parks Choice of Weapons Award and the Jazz Journalist Association’s 2022 Career Achievement in Photography.
Carol’s three-decade presence in the music industry includes design positions at several record labels —as creative director for Elektra Entertainment and Motown, and chief photographer and art director for Blue Note Records. She has photographed and designed the album packages for a wide range of recording artists—from Nina Simone and Quincy Jones to Eric B. and Rakim and Jessye Norman—but it is her photography sessions with the jazz legends and the keepers of the flame on the new frontier that bring her the most pleasure. Friedman began photographing jazz icons while still in art school, compelled by the music and her studies with Life Magazine photographer Phillipe Halsman; inspired by Halsman’s imperative—“a portrait is successful only if it reveals the emotional identity of your subject.”
In the preface of her portrait book The Jazz Pictures, Stanley Crouch says of Friedman: “The heat of the image is what she seeks and that’s what she gets so often and with such originality that we are sometimes caught off guard; there is the temperature of life attending her images; under her virtuoso nudging, their senses and their memories fuse and we see what makes them charismatic or we understand something even music cannot express, which is how this anatomical form or these facial features achieve telling power in space. In that way, her work is the counterpart of the art of the invisible, which is music.”
A lifelong New Yorker, Friedman lives and works in Soho, and frequents the Village Vanguard for continued inspiration. At present, she is photographing and designing album covers and book projects and editing The Music Is The Magic, her documentary feature film on singer Abbey Lincoln.
