William Claxton

LOS ANGELES — William Claxton, the master photographer whose images of Chet Baker helped fuel the jazz trumpeter's stardom in the 1950s and whose fashion photographs of his wife modeling a topless swimsuit were groundbreaking years later, has died. He was 80.

Claxton died from complications of congestive heart failure Saturday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his wife, actress and model Peggy Moffitt Claxton, told the Los Angeles Times.

In a career spanning more than a half century, Claxton also became well known for his work with celebrities, including Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen, who became a close friend. But he gained his foremost public recognition for his photographs of jazz performers including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. It was his photographs of Baker that helped teach him the true meaning of the word photogenic.

"I was up all night developing when the face appeared in the developing tray," Claxton told The Irish Times in 2005. "A tough demeanor and a good physique but an angelic face with pale white skin and, the craziest thing, one tooth missing. He'd been in a fight. I thought, 'My God, that's Chet Baker.'"

Claxton observed that over the years he had taken photographs of some ordinary-looking guys whose faces would just pop out on film. He said that's what Baker had.

His 1951 photograph of Baker started a relationship that continued for the next five or six years as he chronicled Baker's rise to fame as one of the most visible jazz performers of the decade.

Claxton called photography "jazz for the eyes" and tried to capture the often dynamic tension between the artist, the instrument and the music.

Toward the end of the 1950s, Claxton started moving into fashion work. He married Moffitt, who was the muse of fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. In the early 1960s, they created the photographs of the topless bathing suit designed by Gernreich with Moffitt as the model.

Claxton also directed the film "Basic-Black," which is viewed by many as the first fashion video and is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.