I hadn't heard of the photographer Fred Plaut. It turns out taking pictures was a side-gig; what he really did was engineer great recordings for Columbia: Miles's Kind of Blue, Brubeck's Time Out, Bruno Walter, & Glenn Gould. The latter shown here in 1955.
Not bad for an amateur!
More Glenn Gould by Fred Plaut, taken during Gould's first Goldberg Variations sessions in 1955. Half the difficulty in taking great candid portraits of artists is access, & Plaut was there from June 10-16 in Columbia's 30th St Studio, along with producer Howard Scott.
More Glenn Gould by Fred Plaut, taken during Gould's first Goldberg Variations sessions in 1955. Half the difficulty in taking great candid portraits of artists is access, & Plaut was there from June 10-16 in Columbia's 30th St Studio, along with producer Howard Scott.
More Glenn Gould by Fred Plaut, taken during Gould's first Goldberg Variations sessions in 1955. Half the difficulty in taking great candid portraits of artists is access, & Plaut was there from June 10-16 in Columbia's 30th St Studio, along with producer Howard Scott.
Fred Plaut has an impressive list of credits: 322 recordings as engineer at Discogs, & 45 as a photographer. Often his two jobs overlapped. I love this shot of 3 musical giants. It could be subtitled "Collaboration".
Fred Plaut's portrait of Edith Sitwell on this 1949 LP is spectacular. It could have been taken by Cecil Beaton. Or painted by a Flemish Renaissance old master.
Fred Plaut's wife was the soprano Rose Dercourt, who happened to be a close friend of Francis Poulenc. So his LP cover photo from 1963 has the intimacy of family friendship.
I don't know if Fred Plaut had any input into Columbia's LP cover design process, but at least he took the original shot of John Cage for this 1970 LP. He also engineered the album, & it sounds great (it sounds like the cover looks).
https://open.spotify.com/album/5G1D9ZGnmHIe1JOqNFFRPP?si=mmj-OsB9TbKwb4CBC58SwA
The credit for this 1954 Stravinsky LP reads Cover Art: Fred Plaut. So maybe he had a hand in more than just the photography. I'd love to see the original, though.
One of the things I love about LPs is cover design: you never know what will show up next!
There are very few photos by Fred Plaut available on the Internet. Maybe some day they'll show up in a digital repository. In the meantime here's another Glenn Gould shot from 1955; this is well-sourced - it was used in a WSJ article.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hearing-glenn-gould-play-goldberg-variations-anew-1506962736
Well! It turns out that 35,000 Fred Plaut photographs are at Yale University's Gilmore Music Library, which holds The Frederick and Rose Plaut Papers. Here's a great shot of Francis Poulenc.
I hope someday all of these photos become available online.
https://encounteringtheother.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/poulencs-rapsodie-negre/
1,343 shots of Igor Stravinsky! Too much of a good thing? I don't think so. This announcement of the gift from Rose Plaut is from the Winter 1988 issue of Nota Bene, the newsletter of Yale University Library.
Here's a great candid shot by Fred Plaut: Benny Goodman & Leonard Bernstein in rehearsal, c. 1951. The caption of this photo says "Yale University Library", so at least a few of these photos are getting out there.
https://leonardbernstein.com/about/composer/bernstein-and-chamber-music
One of Fred Plaut's great achievements as a sound engineer was his work on Columbia's great Original Broadway Cast albums. Here's a wonderful shot by Don Hunstein of Plaut conferring with Janice Rule, during the recording of The Happiest Girl in the World, from 1961.
Fred Plaut's most famous album as an engineer is Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, from 1959. He must have been too busy to bring out his camera during the sessions, but that's okay, Columbia's great staff photographer, Don Hunstein, was on the job.
Fred Plaut's most famous album as an engineer is Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, from 1959. He must have been too busy to bring out his camera during the sessions, but that's okay, Columbia's great staff photographer, Don Hunstein, was on the job.
Fred Plaut's most famous album as an engineer is Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, from 1959. He must have been too busy to bring out his camera during the sessions, but that's okay, Columbia's great staff photographer, Don Hunstein, was on the job.
Fred Plaut's most famous album as an engineer is Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, from 1959. He must have been too busy to bring out his camera during the sessions, but that's okay, Columbia's great staff photographer, Don Hunstein, was on the job.
Fred Plaut's most famous album as an engineer is Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, from 1959. He must have been too busy to bring out his camera during the sessions, but that's okay, Columbia's great staff photographer, Don Hunstein, was on the job.
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