Clemens Kalischer, John Lee Hooker, black-and-white photograph, 1958

Renowned documentarian photographer Clemens Kalischer was born in Lindau, Germany, in 1921, and his Jewish family fled Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933. Like many other Germans, he was held in various French concentration camps from 1939 to 1942. Kalischer managed to escape in 1942 and made his way to Portugal, where he gained passage on a ship bound for the United States.

"I used to go to the harbor whenever a ship arrived. I had arrived the same way six years previously," Kalischer said. "I saw fear and expectation in the faces of men, women, and children, because I had experienced the same thing. I think it was the empathy which enabled me to move amongst the people and photograph them without disturbing them."

After working in New York, Kalischer moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he has lived for the last few decades. A favorite, subject-rich haunt of the photographer was Lenox's legendary Music Inn. Thanks to the venue's penchant for nurturing new talent and its performers' frequent collaborations with artists appearing at nearby Tanglewood, the club served as a catalyst in the emergence of jazz and folk from crowded urban nightspots into the world's top concert halls.

This 1958 image of blues icon John Lee Hooker appears in a recent PBS documentary about the Music Inn and is part of the permanent collection of the Vault Gallery in Great Barrington. (413) 644-0221; www.vaultgallery.net.

—Peter Aaron