William Crawford cannot remember a time before music. Growing up in Harlem in the 1940s, jazz was everywhere: drifting from apartment windows, pulsing from clubs along 125th Street, crackling through his grandmother’s radio. When he picked up his first camera at 17, he knew immediately what he wanted to photograph.

“I wanted to capture what I heard,” Crawford says, sitting in the Harlem apartment he has occupied for 52 years. “The sounds were already everywhere. I wanted to make them visible.”

Six decades later, that mission has resulted in what curators at the Studio Museum in Harlem are calling one of the most significant archives of jazz photography ever assembled. An exhibition opening this week, “Blue Notes: The Photography of William Crawford,” presents 150 images spanning from 1956 to the present.

The photographs include intimate portraits of Miles Davis backstage at the Apollo, John Coltrane lost in concentration during a studio session, and Nina Simone commanding a small club stage with the intensity that made her a legend. But Crawford’s archive extends far beyond famous names.

“Everyone focuses on the stars,” says exhibition curator Rashida Johnson. “But William photographed everyone: the sidemen, the club owners, the women selling drinks, the couples dancing. He documented an entire world, not just its celebrities.”

That comprehensive approach reflects Crawford’s understanding of jazz as community rather than individual genius. Many of his most affecting images capture musicians between sets: sharing cigarettes, arguing about chord changes, simply existing in spaces where their artistry was respected.

“You cannot understand the music without understanding the life,” Crawford explains. “These men and women were creating under impossible conditions: Jim Crow, police harassment, record labels that cheated them. The photographs tell that story too.”

Crawford never achieved the fame of contemporaries like Gordon Parks or Roy DeCarava, in part because he refused opportunities that would have required leaving Harlem. When Life magazine offered him a staff position in 1968, he declined, preferring to remain in the community where his subjects lived and worked.

“I was not interested in being the Black photographer white magazines could point to,” he says. “I wanted to photograph my people for my people.”

That choice carried costs. For much of his career, Crawford supported himself through commercial work: weddings, portraits, graduations. His jazz photographs sold occasionally to small publications but rarely for significant sums. He raised three children on modest income while maintaining his artistic practice on nights and weekends.

“There were years I thought about quitting,” he admits. “But then I would hear something beautiful, and I would pick up my camera again.”

The archive languished in Crawford’s apartment until Johnson discovered it while researching a separate project. Thousands of negatives and prints filled filing cabinets in his spare bedroom, meticulously organized by date and venue but largely unseen for decades.

“I opened a drawer and found Miles Davis looking back at me,” Johnson recalls. “I knew immediately this was important.”

The Studio Museum acquired rights to exhibit the archive and has begun the process of preserving and digitizing images that had deteriorated over the years. A book accompanying the exhibition presents the first published collection of Crawford’s work.

For Crawford, the sudden attention feels surreal but not entirely welcome. He remains more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it, and the interview requests and event invitations exhaust him.

“I did not do this for recognition,” he says. “I did it because the music demanded to be seen. If people appreciate it now, that is good. But the photographs were always for the musicians and the community. That has not changed.”

The exhibition opens Saturday at the Studio Museum and runs through March 2026. Crawford plans to attend the opening reception but warns he may not stay long.

“These old bones do not party like they used to,” he says with a slight smile. “But I will be there to see the pictures on the walls. After all these years, they deserve a good room.”

Later, walking the Harlem streets where he has spent his entire life, Crawford pauses outside a vacant storefront that once housed a legendary jazz club.

“Everything changes,” he says. “The clubs close, the musicians die, the neighborhood transforms. But the photographs remain. That is why I made them. So something would survive.”