The Blues Anthology - A rhapsody in blues

For the photographer Charles Sawyer – whose work appears in The Blues Anthology at the London gallery Proud Camden, along with images from many other lensmen – his life changed when he took his camera in 1968 to a BB King show at Lennie's-on-the-Turnpike, a club north of Boston.

This exhibition of photographic portraits of blues musicians includes BB King, Muddy Waters, Sam Lightnin' Hopkins, Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker as well as lesser-known musicians of that musical era and blues-influenced jazzers such as Ella Fitzgerald.

The two men became lifelong friends after Sawyer walked into a storage room where the star was hanging out. "He reached his hand out and included me in the conversation." Sawyer then wrote King's authorised biography, The Arrival of BB King in 1980 – and continued to photograph him. The shot of King in 1978 on stage at the High Chaparral, a Chicago nightclub, with his arms outstretched under the spotlights, is particularly poignant. "This gesture expresses for me his own personal redemption by being able to bring people to their feet. He manages to create an enormous intimacy with his audience, so that even in vast places people feel like they are sitting across the kitchen table from him. Here, there were 800 people crammed into one room."

Sawyer also snapped Big Mama Thornton at the Ann Arbor festival in 1970, as well as Paul Butterfield in 1971. Sawyer's shots of Muddy Waters in 1970 and Nina Simone in 1971 were both taken at Lennie's. "This era began in the mid-Sixties and they were revolutionary times," recalls Sawyer. "Until then, the real blues had been hidden from public view and now these black artists who had been in the shadows were commonplace in American culture. It was a dynamic and exciting new world."

The Blues Anthology, Proud Camden, London NW1 (020-7482 3867), to 1 February