Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater by Jack Mitchell

He captured her being chauffeured in her Rolls Royce, sitting at the table in her Broadway dressing room, lounging in a bathtub and even wired up to an EKG machine in her doctor’s office. From 1960 to 1970, he served as her personal paparazzo. Mitchell had a close relationship with Gloria Swanson. He shot a surly, sensitive-looking young bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger, for the cover of After Dark magazine, and a glamorous young Meryl Streep for The Saturday Evening Post. Dancers are in their element, whether caught in midair, seemingly defying gravity, or frozen in a statuesque stance. They convey an energy radiating from his subjects without contrivance. They evoke movement through elegant poses and disciplined muscular tension. Mitchell’s dance pictures are both ethereal and dynamic. He was an expert in lighting, working mostly, though not entirely, in black-and-white, and he was known by his subjects, by the magazine, and newspaper editors he worked for, and by critics, as someone who could take a photograph that would reveal the subject’s character. Mitchell took hundreds of pictures for The New York Times, as both portraitist and a capturer of complex motion. The Smithsonian now holds The Jack Mitchell Photography of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Collection, including 8,288 black-and-white negatives, 2,106 color slides and transparencies, and 339 black-and-white prints.

The Smithsonian called him the benchmark by which other dance photographers assessed their own work. Mitchell was one of the first photographers to treat creative individuals as characters outside of their work.

His work appeared in major newspapers and on the cover of magazines, including over 160 covers of Dance magazine. His photographic portfolio of actors, writers, painters, musicians, and especially dancers remain a truly great pictorial history late 20th century performing arts. “ Always ask for more and sometimes you’ll get it.”

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater by Jack Mitchell