Draft:Kathy Sloane

Kathy Sloane (born 1940) is an acclaimed Jewish American photographer who spent decades documenting San Francisco's vibrant culture. Her photography of jazz club icons has been praised as some of the greatest jazz portraits in history and places her with photographers William Gottlieb and Herman Leonard. Sloane is best known for her work documenting legendary jazz club Keystone Korner in San Francisco.

Early life and career
Sloane was born in New York in 1940. She began working as a teacher but quit to become a self-taught photographer. Sloane initially started out as a documentary photographer. In 1976, she met Todd Barkan who allowed her free admission to Keystone Korner in exchange for a print of each headliner. She was drawn to jazz music and its improvisation, beauty, and resistance that was for her a metaphor of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, which she participated in as a literature and writing teacher. She is now based in Oakland, California.

Photography
She spent decades photographing notable jazz musicians, including Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Rahhsaan Roland Kirk, Cecil Taylor, Milt Jackson and Charles Mingus. Her distinct archive of performance photography has led to several exhibitions, including 'Kathy Sloane’s Keystone Korner: Portrait of a Jazz Club' in 2015 and 'NO WALLS BETWEEN US' in 2013.

Sloane has been praised for her intimate club photography and oral history interviews with musicians, patrons, waitresses, and jazz producers. At the time, she was one of the few photographers who asked Black musicians for their consent to photograph them onstage. In 2011 she published her photographs and interviews as a book, titled 'Keystone Korner: Portrait of a Jazz Club' which won her the Best Book of the Year in Performance Art by Foreword Reviews. Al Young, a California writer and Poet Laureate, wrote the foreword of her book.

'I developed fine, long-lasting friendships with many of the artists, and I had a few wonderfully intense love affairs along the way (despite promising myself that I would not get involved with these magical musicians)', Sloane wrote in Keystone Korner. Her close relationships to jazz players, music producers, and front-of-house staff allowed Sloane to create an intimate and colorful portrait of the jazz community.

After Keystone Korner closed in 1983, Sloane worked as a freelance photographer for the Johnson Publishing Company's Ebony Magazine, where she carried out portraits of Black Californians.

Sloane's archives are housed in permanent collections across the United States, including the DeSaisset Museum in Santa Clara, CA, the Smithsonian Institution, Jazz Oral History Program, The East Bay Community Foundation, and UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library.

Filmography
In the 2000s, Sloane began creating films. Her Witness to Hiroshima (2009) premiered at the Human Rights Film Festivals and 15 others, winning best short film at the Grey’s Reef Ocean Film Festival.