The Jazz Photographers' Portfolio, as with the Jazz Greats Digital Exhibits, represents a new periodic feature of the Institute of Jazz Studies web site. The Portfolio series is designed to showcase the work of both historical and contempary works by leading jazz photographers. In the case of living photographers, the series will feature video or audio clips where artists speak about their work, interspered with a gallery of between 30 and 50 of their selected images.

The first artist to be featured is Lourdes Delgado, a Spanish-born, Brooklyn-based photographer, who continues to produce a series of environmental portraits of jazz musicians and others involved in jazz (promoters, broadcasters, club owners, for example) entitled Jazz in New York: A Community of Visions. She utilizes large-format photography and, like a jazz musician sure of her footing, shoots one frame only after her subject has decided upon the setting in which he or she would be photographed.

The Portfolio series, while displaying the work of jazz photographers who are themselves historical figures in some cases, will seek out work depicting how photographers are documenting jazz today and in the music's more recent past that will be deemed "historic" in a few short years.