William Gottlieb, who died Sunday at 89, created iconic images of the jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and, most famously of all, Billie Holiday, whom he captured once mid-yawp, shortly after she emerged cleaned up and singing spectacularly after a stretch in prison on a drug rap.

“She couldn’t get any drugs or alcohol while she was incarcerated,” Gottlieb recalled in an oral history for the Library of Congress. “I caught this close-up of her in a way that you could really see the anguish that must have been coming out of her throat.”

For a 10-year period, from 1938-48, Gottlieb photographed hundreds of jazz players to accompany his articles in the Washington Post and Down Beat magazine. Ironically, he was paid for his writing and did the photos for free.

After 1948, he was among the leading producers of educational filmstrips, with a total of more than 1,000 films to his credit on topics from number theory to space flight to how to set a table. Only after he retired as head of Mc-Graw Hill’s educational film division did he go back to his old negatives.

When they were collected in “The Golden Age of Jazz” (1979), they caught a rising wave of nostalgia for the pre-bebop era and Gottlieb suddenly became lionized as a photographer.

As Whitney Balliett wrote in his New Yorker review of “The Golden Age of Jazz,” “Gottlieb was not taking pictures; he was photographing a music … Gottlieb stopped photographing jazz musicians in 1948. No one has surpassed him yet.”

So esteemed were his photos that the Library of Congress collected all 1,600 of them, and the U.S. Postal Service used them as the basis for stamps featuring Charlie Parker, Jimmy Rushing, Mildred Bailey, and Billie Holiday.

Gottlieb grew up in Brooklyn and in Bound Brook, N.J., where his father was in the lumber business. He told interviewers that he got interested in jazz while at Lehigh University, after he was stricken with trichinosis from eating undercooked pork, and spent the summer recuperating in bed. A friend brought him some jazz records. “I was a Guy Lombardo fan,” Gottlieb said in the oral history interview. “This fellow straightened me out though and put me on to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.”

In 1938, Gottlieb began working in the advertising department of the Washington Post, and soon began writing a weekly column on the D.C. jazz scene. When the Post declined to send along a photographer, Gottlieb sold a bunch of records he’d received as promotions and invested in a clunky large format Speed Graphic, the standard newspaper camera of the day. Because the camera was difficult to use and supplies were expensive and he was bankrolling them, he set up the shots carefully and usually only took a few photos at each session.

Gottlieb also hosted a local jazz radio show, and became, he said, the “Mr. Jazz of Washington.” He even helped set up an after-hours session between the bands of Count Basie and Bob Crosby, no mean feat in the highly segregated Washington jazz scene.

Gottlieb took graduate courses in economics, and in 1942 worked briefly for the Office of Price Administration before being drafted. He served in the Army for four years stateside as a photographic officer, but continued to write his Washington Post column, which he contended was the first newspaper column devoted solely to jazz.

In 1946, Gottlieb moved to New York and went to work for Down Beat as an assistant editor. At Down Beat, Gottlieb’s photos became more elaborately planned. He photographed Stan Kenton reflected in a mirror that appeared to be shattered by one of Kenton’s trumpet players. He photographed singer Mel Torme, whose smooth instrument went by the moniker of the “Velvet Fog” crooning through a haze of evaporating dry ice.

In 1948, Gottlieb hung up his Speed Graphic, closed his typewriter case, and went to work for Curriculum Films, an educational filmstrip company that happened to be in an office adjacent to Down Beat’s. The music business was in recession, but, Gottlieb said, “Most important of all, I was really something of a square; I had a wife and children, and the joys of staying out until 4 a.m. with musicians, even those who were my idols, had evaporated, especially since I was often the only sober one there.”

Within a few years, Gottlieb had his own filmstrip company. Over the years, he won many awards from the Educational Film Librarians Association. He also wrote children’s books with titles like “Tiger’s Adventure” (1954) and “Jets and Rockets and How They Work” (1959). “Laddie the Superdog,” based loosely on Superman, was a children’s best seller in 1954.

In retirement, Gottlieb occasionally picked up the camera again to photograph Les Paul, Gerry Mulligan, and a few others. He remained a fan of the jazz of his photographer years, but wasn’t very interested in what followed, citing Miles Davis as his cutoff point.

William Paul Gottlieb

Born January 28, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y.; died April 23 at his home in Great Neck after suffering a stroke; survived by his wife of 66 years, Delia Potofsky, his children, Barbara, Steven, Richard, and Edward, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.