Background
Gottlieb was born on January 28, 1917 in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, and he grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey, where his father was in the building and lumber business.
Gottlieb was born on January 28, 1917 in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, and he grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey, where his father was in the building and lumber business.
He graduated from Lehigh University in 1938, with a degree in economics.
Gottlieb"s photographs are among the best known and widely reproduced images of this era of jazz. During the course of his career, Gottlieb took portraits of hundreds of prominent jazz musicians and personalities, typically while they were playing or singing at well-known New York City jazz clubs. Well-known musicians Gottlieb photographed included Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, Jo Stafford, Thelonious Monk, Stan Kenton, Ray McKinley, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan, Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Carter.
While at Lehigh, Gottlieb wrote for the weekly campus newspaper and became editor-in-chief of The Lehigh Review.
In his last year of college, he began writing a weekly jazz column for the Washington Post. After the Post decided that it could not afford to pay a photographer to shoot photos for Gottlieb"s jazz column, Gottlieb bought his own press camera and began taking pictures for his column.
Gottlieb was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1943, and he served as a photo officer and as a classifications officer After World World War II, Gottlieb went to New York City to pursue journalism.
He worked as a writer-photographer for Down Beat magazine (then the leading jazz magazine), and his work also appeared frequently in Record Changer, the Saturday Review, and Collier"son
After Gottlieb left Down Beat, he began working at Curriculum Films, an educational filmstrip company. He then founded his own filmstrip company which was later bought by McGraw Hill. He also wrote educational books such as Science Facts You Won"t Believe and Space Flight.
Apart from his photography career, Gottlieb was also involved in amateur tennis as a hobby.
Gottlieb"s son Steven has also become a professional photographer. Steven Gottlieb"s photographs have been featured extensively on the web sites of both Kodak and Nikon, and Kodak has named Steven one of five "Kodak Professional Icons" in the United States. Architect I. M. Pei stated that " Gottlieb transcends traditional architectural photography by interpreting architecture with the vision of a true artist."
Gottlieb died of complications from a stroke on April 23, 2006 Great Neck, New New York
In line with Gottlieb"s wishes, his photographs were put into the public domain. Many of his pictures are used in this encyclopedia and other public domain works.