One Unique Week: Photos bring artist and artist together

When you open Billie Holiday's website, the first words you see are "She sang the truth, she paid the price." The original "lady who sang the blues" was a cultural icon, remembered for her voice, her songwriting -- and the tragic ways in which her life played out. Addicted to heroin, she was only 44 when she died July 17, 1959, of heart and liver issues related to alcohol and drug abuse.

That is not the Billie Holiday Jerry Dantzic photographed -- or the Billie Holiday his son Grayson wants viewers of those photographs to see. The collection on show at the Fort Smith Regional Art Museum, organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with the Jerry Dantzic Archives, introduces the woman behind a generally perceived image of tragic heroine.

"This is a Billie Holiday the world has never seen," says Grayson Dantzic, whose enthusiasm for his father's work would melt an iceberg. "It does show her more in a complete way as a human being. And the laughter and love between her and her beloved chihuahua, Pepi! There is no other body of work like this in the history of Billie Holiday -- and that a white photographer was able to capture that in the 1950s is amazing. There was so much trust and faith and negotiation between the two of them.

"You think you know Billie Holiday? You don't know Billie Holiday. Go to this exhibition, and it will challenge you. And that is my gift to you -- and to a woman I never got to meet but who changed my life by the music she sang."

According to the Smithsonian, it was April 1957 when Jerry Dantzic had an assignment from Decca Records to photograph Billie Holiday during a weeklong run of performances at the Newark, N.J., nightclub Sugar Hill.

"What unfolded was an unexpected and intimate journey into her private and public worlds," says the exhibit information from the Smithsonian. "His photos comprise the largest collection of images from any single Holiday club engagement."

The exhibition of those photos came about because Grayson Dantzic kept pitching it -- and because he'd loved the music of Billie Holiday since he was a child.

"As an only child, my spiritual parents in the musical sense were Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra," he says. "Talk about comparative voices that could give you all the colors of the human experience! They filled it all in between the two of them."

And of all his father's photographs, those he took of Billie Holiday that week in 1957 were unique for several reasons, not the least of which was that Grayson was able, through the negatives, to put them in chronological order. He had already collected them in a book titled "Jerry Dantzic: Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill," published in March 2017, and when he realized he had a connection to one of the senior project directors at the Smithsonian, "I made the pitch. I did the dance. I gave them the book. It was God's will this happened."

"This is a story about a powerful woman -- a powerful black woman -- who used her art to challenge the status quo to fight misogyny, to fight racism, to fight prejudice, to fight for the decriminalization of drug offenses (especially those unfairly targeting the black community), and the list goes on," says Sara Artes, an exhibition specialist who handled the Holiday exhibit for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. "She was a powerhouse. Music moved her, and she moved others through her music. My favorite photos are her on stage, illuminated by spotlights, completely immersed in her songs. At the same time, the photographs of her ... walking on the street ground me in her humanness."

Artes says what the Smithsonian saw was "an opportunity to see Billie Holiday shine not only on stage but in her personal world. The excitement that Grayson brings to the project is contagious. The entire 'Team Billie' at SITES has gone above and beyond to make sure her story through the lens of Grayson's father is told in the most passionate of ways."

The timing for the exhibition to tour couldn't suit Grayson Dantzic better. He sees Holiday as a poster child of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"I want to take away what people have put upon Billie -- that characterization as a drug addict, an abused woman. They have minimized her because she was so powerful, because she was provocative in her lifestyle, because she was challenging to the norms of society -- and because she sang like Louis Armstrong played the trumpet. It's so one-dimensionalizing.

"Billie was a trailblazer. The whole point of the exhibition is to give her back her humanity through what my father was able to capture in only 11 rolls of film. They were two artists working together from both sides of the stage. Billie is constantly looking at my father to make sure he's doing right by her -- but it's with full-on smiles with no stress between the eyes. She trusted him. In such a small time, across the color barrier, she trusted him.

"My father used to say, 'I called her Billie, and she called me Jerry.' He really respected that woman."

Of course, Grayson Dantzic also wants to memorialize his father, a man he says was larger than life.

"He was a shell of a man for the last few years of his life," Grayson says sadly. "But he's never been more alive than he is now, through these pictures."

According to Grayson, his father was a writer and did some photography for Stars & Stripes during World War II, but it was after the war, in New York City, that he started shooting famous people for famous publications -- Jason Robards in "The Iceman Cometh" at Circle in the Square Theatre, for example -- and sharing the blossoming world of photography with "hotshots" of the time.

By the time Grayson came along, his dad "wanted to go out and document America -- small towns, landmarks, his vision of America," he recalls. "And I got to go along. We traveled 15 summers, even to Alaska and Hawaii, so we saw all 50 states."

The work was groundbreaking, photographed in a panoramic format that Jerry Dantzic created by adapting a Cirkut camera with special color film cut for him by Kodak, and it led to his first solo exhibition in 1978 at the Museum of Modern Art.

Still, Grayson Dantzic says, he didn't pay much attention to his father's legacy until Jerry became ill.

"I came upon the statement, the people that we love the most, we know the least,'" Grayson told Jill Waterman, writing for B&H Photo Video magazine. "When I mentioned this, Dad said, 'Why don't you go up to my photo studio, look around and see what you find.'

"Among the first photographs I discovered were Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Ingrid Bergman, and a variety of other celebrities," Grayson remembered. "And I was immediately struck with the thought, I'm going to quit my job and work for my father. I'm going to find out who he was, and we're going to do something exciting with his archives.'"

"The man I knew was larger than life," Grayson reemphasizes now. "He would run up on top of buildings to get the best view or walk out to the edge of a mountain where there was no railing, to see if there was a good shot there. He was a man in motion. It was so crazy that at the end of his life, he was stuck in bed and couldn't get away from me, and I took advantage of that moment."