William Paul Gottlieb was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., attended Lehigh University, and after graduating in 1938 took a job in the advertising department of The Washington Post. He persuaded The Post to let him write a weekly column on jazz, but the newspaper couldn't afford to send a photographer to the shows. Gottlieb decided to shoot the photos himself. He purchased a Speed Graphic press camera. Supplies like film and flash bulbs were expensive, so Gottlieb limited himself to just a few photos per show, carefully composing portraits of the singers and musicians. Since Gottlieb was shooting pictures for free, The Post allowed him to keep his negatives, giving him the start of what would become a valuable library of photographs used on many album covers, posters, T-shirts and other products. Gottlieb eventually quit his advertising job and began working at the Universtiy of Maryland, but continued shooting photos, writing his newspaper column and hosting radio shows about jazz. He was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1943, and served as a photo officer. After WWII, he moved to New York and worked for Down Beat, a jazz magazine, writing about the photographing of the stars who played New York's jazz clubs .As the city's jazz scene faded in the late 1940s, Gottlieb left Down Beat, and joined Curriculum Films, a filmstrip company, and later started his own filmstrip company, which was sold to McGraw-Hill. The Gottlieb photographs seem familiar to us because we have seen them in newspapers, television documentaries, magazines, museums, and on over 250 CD covers. In 1994, the United States Postal Service selected Gottlieb's portraits of Billie Holliday, Charlie Parker, Mildred Bailey, and Jimmy Rushing for a series of commorative postage stamps.
Gottlieb's legacy lives on at the Library of Congress, which houses his entire collection of photographs documenting the jazz scene from 1938 to 1948. Gottlieb, died on April 23, 2006, at the age of 89. In 1991 the Library purchased Gottlieb's collection with financial support from the Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin fund. Included are approximately 1600 negatives and color transparencies, 54 framed exhibition prints, 950 reference prints and accompanying contact prints.