Focus on Jazz
Photo Exhibition by Guy Fonck
FOCUS ON JAZZ is the first black-and-white photography exhibition by Luxembourgish photographer Guy Foncksince the publication of his book Focus On Women In Jazz (Éditions Schortgen) in late 2024.
Strongly inspired by the book’s central theme, the exhibition highlights the essential role of women in jazz. While Focus On Women In Jazz is devoted exclusively to women from the national and international jazz scenes, FOCUS ON JAZZbroadens this perspective.
Through a carefully curated selection of photographs, the exhibition presents a deliberately utopian vision of the jazz world – one in which gender parity between jazzmen and jazzwomen is taken for granted.
Having photographed jazz concerts for nearly 50 years, Guy Fonck presents here mainly recent works drawn from a photographic archive documenting more than 500 jazz concerts.
It Started with a Click
A Short Biography of Guy Fonck
.
I was born on 28 January 1961 in Luxembourg. I received my first camera, an Agfa Click, in 1968. In 1975, my photographs gained their first recognition at various national and international photo exhibitions. Two years later, in 1977, I discovered jazz music and joined jazzclubluxembourg.
I began photographing jazz concerts and festivals in black and white, using an Asahi Pentax camera and primarily Kodak Tri-X film. I produced my own enlargements in my personal darkroom.
In 1979, 1983, 1986, 1989, 1992, and 1995, my photographs were exhibited at the Internationaler Fotosalon Zeitgenössischer Musik Burghausen (International Photo Exhibition of Contemporary Music, Burghausen, Germany), where they received multiple awards. In 1984, I took part in the Nikon Meets Jazz. competition, and my photographs were published in the specialist magazine Jazz, based in Basel, Switzerland. This was followed by a permanent exhibition of my jazz photographs at the Malakoff Jazz Café in Luxembourg and participation in the group exhibition Carte blanche aux photographes luxembourgeois in 1987.
From 1986 onward, I became increasingly involved with jazzclubluxembourg, organizing jazz concerts and festivals, including the annual Jazz Rallye Luxembourg and numerous jazz-related events in 1995, when Luxembourg was designated Cultural Capital of Europe. Due to this intensive involvement, I stopped photographing for nearly ten years. During this period, I became a regular contributor of jazz articles to Phare, the weekly cultural supplement of Tageblatt(Luxembourg’s second-largest daily newspaper), and hosted a jazz radio program on Luxembourg’s public radio station, Radio 100,7.
In 2003, I rediscovered photography through a new digital Canon camera and returned to black-and-white jazz photography. At the same time, I continued programming concerts for jazzclubluxembourg until its activities ended in 2007. During this period, my concert photographs were regularly published in Luxembourg’s largest daily newspaper, Luxemburger Wort. In 2008, I returned to Tageblatt as a regular contributor of jazz photography.
In 2007, I served as a jury member for the Eurodjango Eurojazz Awards and was also the official photographer for the European awards ceremonies. In December 2007, my work was exhibited at the photo exhibition Jazz at the Conservatoire de Musique in Luxembourg.
In October 2010, I presented a private exhibition of 55 photographs in the cloister of Neumünster Abbey (Luxembourg-Grund). Prior to this exhibition, I published my first black-and-white jazz photography book, Focus On Jazz (2009), self-published via digital printing and distributed through the online bookstore Blurb.
In March 2011, I was invited to contribute a photograph to JAZZ: The Smithsonian Anthology, published by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Other contributors included Lee Tanner and the legendary photographer Herman Leonard, who passed away in August 2010.
In 2013, I was contacted by the German publishing house Schroedel to contribute a photograph to their school textbook Musik Um Uns. My work was later featured in a dedicated portrait titled Guy Fonck: Jazz from Behind the Lens, while I simultaneously collaborated as a photographer with the Dutch magazine Jazz in Europe in 2019.
The year 2024 marked a significant milestone with the publication of my second black-and-white jazz photography book, Focus On Women In Jazz, released by Éditions Schortgen. In December 2024, the London-based magazine Women In Jazz Media published an article featuring photographs from the book.
In 2025, I contributed photography to the album cover of Proximity Alert by Russ Lossing (Blaser Music). That same year, several of my photographs were selected and awarded at the Yambol Jazz competition in Bulgaria, receiving the YPC Silver Medal and the DIPA Bronze Medal. The year concluded on a very positive note with the nomination of Focus On Women In Jazz for the Lëtzebuerger Buchpräis (Luxembourg Book Prize) in the “Thematic Book” category.
My photographs can be viewed online at www.focusonjazz.lu, www.allaboutjazz.com, and on my Instagram and Facebook pages: Focus On Jazz by Guy Fonck.
