Jack Mitchell: photographer to the dance - Cover Story - Illustration

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Clive Barnes

Jack Mitchell, photographer. Photographer extra-ordinary. Photographer to Dance Magazine, the New York Times, the entire world of dance. The dance of our now and our more or less immediate then, will be seen in the future in quite large measure through the Mitchell lens. Dance, through video and such film archives as the pioneering work of Ann Barzel, is beginning to leave better records of its ongoing transience, yet most of the compelling images of dance and dancers past will still be those suggested by the inadequate words of its scribes and the frozen stills of its photographers. These are the unpoetic Gautiers and mechanical Chalons of the non-Romantic Ballet.

Mitchell's decision to retire from the hurly-burly of dance photography seems unthinkable. He has been part of dance's furniture for so long, even I forget when I first encountered his work, or, for that matter, when I first met him. I look at the reference books and note - with honest amazement - not only that he passed his seventieth birthday last September, but that he has been a contributing photographer to this magazine since 1952. Forty-three years of pictures, of dance history.

What do I know of Jack? Surprisingly little, I suppose. I first got to know his photographs a lifetime ago, when I was executive editor of the London-based magazine Dance and Dancers, which I helped start in 1950. And it was during the fifties that I became aware of Mitchell's work, just as it was during the sixties that I first met him, introduced I think by either Dance Magazine's Lydia Joel or possibly Seymour Peck, then editor of the New York Times's Arts and Leisure section, where Jack was also a fixture.

When the Florida-born Mitchell started out, ballet photography in America had already given us, among others, Maurice Seymour, Fred Fehl and George Platt Lynes; in Europe Serge Lido (with his "environmental" shots of dancers), the Mydtskov family in Copenhagen, Roger Wood, Baron, and Houston Rogers had all left a mark. And soon Mitchell himself would be joined by Martha Swope, Herbert Migdoll, and the more arcane Max Waldman in New York City, and by Anthony Crickmay, Reg Wilson, and the eventually Anglo-American Roy Round in London.

Mitchell, of course, always wore his photography with a character-defining difference, as his peers did theirs. His work, hard-edged and clear, suggested a no-nonsense documentary air, but combined this clear-sightedness with a still, spare, even ascetic poetry that spoke to and for its subject matter. He saw dance through an unsentimental viewfinder, yet always saw it with his own passion for movement, his own sense of drama, his own feel for character. His was a unique camera - the unique vision of any major photographer.

By preference he always worked in the studio or, should that not be possible, the classroom. Rehearsal shots were fine, but for portraits he virtually demanded the studio's one-on-one atmosphere: the studio, where that unique portrait transaction - between how the photographer sees the sitter and how the sitter sees himself - can take place in a comparative quietness of the soul. Sy Peck, a great arts editor with an osmotic nose for zeitgeist ins and cultural outs, would sometimes expand on his portraiture by getting Mitchell to take group shots - of young choreographers, say, or a flurry of ballerinas or a pride of premiers danseurs - for the Sunday Time's Arts and Leisure section, but the portraits were usually more staid, more formal, and, for just that matter, more revealing.

I well remember when he first took my portrait. Having your picture taken by well-known photographers is always both an ordeal and an experience. With Mitchell it is nothing resembling the horror of mass photographers offered by Avedon, the chilling politeness of Beaton, or the boozy camaraderie of Baron. But Mitchell, like every photographer worth his or her salt, lures you into revealing that little more of your psyche than you perhaps wished to reveal. It all seems so simple - until the camera's editorializing begins and your personality stands jay-naked on a glossy print. And Mitchell has proved himself a master of the candid portrait, a poetic paparazzo for the historical record.

In 1967 Jack and I collaborated on a book, Dance Scene U.S.A. Well, I say we collaborated, but not really; I merely provided a text and commentary for Jack's pictures, which were, of course, the point of the book, and the reason for it finding its way onto well-bred coffee tables. Looking at the book today I am amazed at how much Mitchell saw and noted of that world that embraced him. I look at the pictures of Bruhn and Nureyev together alone in class, the portraits of Balanchine and de Mille, of Tudor, Taylor, and Graham, the action shots of Edward Villella and Pat Neary in The Prodigal Son, or a rare reportorial picture showing the Joffrey dancers rehearsing Gamelan on the south lawn of the White House - June 14, 1965. I look at all these pictures and see indeed, frozen in a time as if in amber, the dance scene U.S.A. of virtually thirty years ago.