Jack Mitchell

Jack Mitchell

Born: September 13, 1925
Age: 99
Birthplace: Key West, Florida, U.S.
Please login to contact Jack Mitchell...
Email:
Password:
Don't have an account yet?  Join FanPal.com Today!
Biography

Can you help resolve this issue? For more details on this topic, see Wikipedia:CP § Responding to articles listed for copyright investigation. If you hold the copyright to this text, you can license it in a manner that allows its use on Wikipedia. Click "Show" to see how.

  1. You must permit the use of your material under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts).
  2. Explain your intent to license the content on this article's discussion page
  3. To confirm your permission, you can either display a notice to this effect at the site of original publication or send an e-mail from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-en at wikimedia dot org or a postal letter to the Wikimedia Foundation. These messages must explicitly permit use under CC-BY-SA and the GFDL. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials.
  4. Note that articles on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view and must be verifiable in published third-party sources; consider whether, copyright issues aside, your text is appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia.
To demonstrate that this text is in the public domain, or is already under a license suitable for Wikipedia, click "Show". Explain this on this article's discussion page, with reference to evidence. Wikipedia:Public domain and Wikipedia:Compatibly licensed may assist in determining the status. Otherwise, you may write a new article without copyright-infringing material. Click "Show" to read where and how.

Your rewrite should be placed on this page, where it will be available for an administrator or clerk to review it at the end of the listing period. Follow this link to create the temporary subpage.

  • Simply modifying copyrighted text is not sufficient to avoid copyright infringement—if the original copyright violation cannot be cleanly removed or the article reverted to a prior version, it is best to write the article from scratch. (See Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing.)
  • For license compliance, any content used from the original article must be properly attributed; if you use content from the original, please leave a note at the top of your rewrite saying as much. You may duplicate non-infringing text that you had contributed yourself.
  • It is always a good idea, if rewriting, to identify the point where the copyrighted content was imported to Wikipedia and to check to make sure that the contributor did not add content imported from other sources. When closing investigations, clerks and administrators may find other copyright problems than the one identified. If this material is in the proposed rewrite and cannot be easily removed, the rewrite may not be usable.
State that you have created a rewrite on this article's discussion page.
About importing text to Wikipedia For more details on this topic, see Wikipedia:Copying text from other sources. Instructions for filing

If you have tagged the article for investigation, please complete the following steps:

at the end of the portion you intend to blank.



Jack Mitchell (September 13, 1925 - November 7, 2013) was an American photographer and author best known for his photographs of American artists, dancers, film and theatre performers, musicians and writers.

Mitchell was born in Key West, Florida, in 1925; his family moved to New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in 1932. He started photography at eleven, as the darkroom assistant to his sister. He then moved on to taking his own photographs, and was soon contributing photographs to the Daytona News Journal and New Smyrna Beach News. He earned his living from photography since he was fifteen, when his first nationally published photograph, a portrait of his oil painting instructor, appeared in The Complete Photographer.

In 1950, four years after completion of duty as a public relations photographer for the U.S. Army in Florence and Venice, Mitchell moved from Florida to New York City. The dancer and choreographer Ted Shawn suggested that he concentrate on photographing dance and dancers. The recommendation proved fortuitous as that work provided an avenue to his later success photographing creative and performing artists of all disciplines.

Read more...

Career

From 1960 to 1970, Mitchell was the official photographer for the American Ballet Theatre, taking all the photographs for their souvenir program books. He also photographed the Boston Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Pennsylvania Ballet, Houston Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company, New York City Ballet and the Paul Taylor Dance Company. He has photographed most of the world's leading dance companies for The New York Times and for Dance Magazine.

Mitchell is possibly best known for his numerous special assignment photographs for the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times from 1970 to 1995. When he closed his New York studio on December 17, 1995, The Times published a full-page illustrated article about his work and career. Within it, Annette Grant wrote:

Mr. Mitchell, one of the premier arts photographers of our day, is retiring at age 70 and moving back to his home state, Florida. . . . . has included 5,240 assignments in black and white alone. He hasn't kept track of the color, but there have been 163 covers for Dance Magazine and four books.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Mitchell's portrait of musicians John Lennon and Yoko Ono was used on the cover of the December 1980 Lennon Memorial edition of People. The photo was taken in Mitchell's home studio and first published on November 9, 1980, a month before Lennon was killed. John Yau commented:

In his tender portraits of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which Mitchell took just a few weeks before Lennon was murdered, he has elicited a side of them that was seldom seen, except perhaps by their closest friends. Attentive to their pose, their faces, and even to the texture of their skin and clothes, he infuses his photographs with a palpable tactility. Sensing that we could (and of course we cannot) reach out and touch the weave of Lennon's sweater and Ono's scarf is what makes his photographs of them all the more moving. Around Mitchell, both Lennon and Ono let down their guard. Full of charm we always knew was there, Lennon mugs for the camera, while Ono looks at him both protectively and lovingly. In all of Mitchell's photographs from this session, something of Lennon's touching shyness and Ono's tough-minded sweetness comes through.

Twelve of Mitchell's photographs of Lennon and Ono appear in Ono's book John Lennon: Summer of 1980.

Books

In the 1960s, Mitchell published the photobooks American Dance Portfolio and, for younger readers, Dance Scene U.S.A.: America's Greatest Ballet and Modern Dance Companies in Photographs.

Mitchell is the author of Icons and Idols: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Arts, 1960-1995, which has been called “a stunning exhibition of 137 black and white photographs featuring icons of American culture”.

Mitchell's book on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is published as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Jack Mitchell Photographs.

Permanent collections

In 2008, the Smithsonian Institution announced that Mitchell had donated to it "54 large-format photographs of painters and sculptors taken in New York City between 1966 and 1977"; John W. Smith, director of the Archives of American Art, commented that “Jack’s images greatly enhance our already important holdings of artist’s portraits and we look forward to sharing these images with scholars and researchers.”

The Baltimore Museum of Art owns a number of Mitchell's portraits.

Mitchell had a long-standing relationship with the Atlantic Center for the Arts, located in his hometown of New Smyrna Beach. The Jack Mitchell Portrait Gallery displays Mitchell's photographic portraits of ACA Master Artists from 1982-2004. Mitchell himself was an ACA Master Artist in 1983. Mitchell also served on ACA’s National Council advisory board from 1993 to 2006.

Documentary film on Mitchell's life and work

Craig Highberger's documentary on Mitchell's life and work, Jack Mitchell: My Life Is Black And White, shows hundreds of Mitchell's photographs and includes interviews with many of his subjects, including Edward Albee, Clive Barnes, Merce Cunningham, Patti LuPone and Ned Rorem.

Personal life

Mitchell credits much of his success as a photographer to his fifty-two-year life and business partnership with Robert Pavlik, who died in 2009:

Bob took care of my books, taxes, the apartment, and wonderful gourmet cooking for us. And, although he avoided the limelight, he masterminded and cooked for cocktail and dinner parties we had for some . Bob worked hard to help me.

Death

After a forty-five-year career in New York City, Mitchell retired to New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Until his death, he continued to produce black and white exhibition prints from his negative files and worked on another book of his fifty-five years of dance photography.

On November 7, 2013, at the age of eighty-eight, Mitchell died at his home in New Smyrna Beach.

Gallery

[ Source: Wikipedia ]


Terms Privacy Join Contact
Contact Any Star FanPal • 2024