The photography of jazz created a visual rhetoric that argued for racial inclusiveness in the 1930s, racial equality in the 1940s and 1950s, and black cultural nationalism in the 1960s. The identification of the music as culturally African American had to be constructed over time by the interaction of musicians with visual representation in the contexts of depression and war, record business economics, the evolving civil rights movement, and the dynamics of interracial collaboration and black self-assertion over the course of decades. Although these goals were often complicated by the racial discourse in the jazz press and by the claims made upon the music by competing political and economic agendas, photographs describe the social and political significance of jazz in American cultural history. In the 1930s and 1940s, photojournalists Charles Peterson and Gjon Mili challenged Life's racial template, promoting an inclusive social vision. They visually represented the significance of African American musical culture in their images of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and others even as the magazine exerted editorial control that served segregationist and U.S. nationalist agendas. In the late 1940s, William Gottlieb's and Herman Leonard's photographs gave dramatic visual form to bebop's strong African American identity. They could not save the music from commercial failure---despite Dizzy Gillespie's camera-ready approach to publicity---but created long-neglected archives of canonizing photographs. In the 1950s, the long-playing record album developed by Columbia Records temporarily revived jazz's fortunes. Miles Davis, recording for the major label, achieved uncompromising control of his image on album covers while being broadly marketed as an international pop star. Sonny Rollins challenged a black/white racial dichotomy in the album covers of small independent labels on the east and west coasts, engaging established cultural tropes and asserting the moral necessity of a politics of equality. As the jazz audience declined in the 1960s, Roy DeCarava's images of John Coltrane drew inspiration from the music to create a black aesthetic in photography. In the context of 1960s black cultural nationalism, he constructed jazz as a predominantly African American art form while retaining the essential humanism of his work.