Jack Mitchell

Flutist Ransom Wilson, signed by Jack Mitchell

1977

11 x 14" vintage silver gelatin photograph of Flutist Ransom Wilson in 1977. Signed by Jack Mitchell on the print verso. Comes directly from th...

11 x 14" vintage silver gelatin photograph of Robert La Tourneaux, Broadway and film star of "Boys in the Band" - 1969.. Signed by Jack Mitchell on...

Jack Mitchell (September 13, 1925 – November 7, 2013) was an American photographer. He photographed American artists, dancers, film and theatre performers, musicians and writers.[1] His portraiture, lighting skill, and ability to capture dancers in what he termed "moving stills" made him one of the most important dance photographers of the 20th century. He photographed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for three decades, producing a body of work that includes over ten thousand images. He was the official photographer of the American Ballet Theatre for a decade and also photographed dancers for other top ballet companies in the US and Canada. His work appeared in major newspapers and on the cover of major magazines, including over 160 covers of Dance Magazine. Arts Magazine called him the first photographer to treat creative individuals as characters outside of their works. Smithsonian called him the benchmark by which other dance photographers assessed their own work. Early life Mitchell was born in Key West in 1925, and he was raised there and in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where his family moved in 1931.[2][3] His father worked for the railroad.[2] He became interested in photography, and when he was twelve his parents bought him a Kodak Baby Brownie for $54.[2][3][4] Career By age 15 he had met Florida's licensing standards to obtain a press pass, by age 16 he was working as a commercial photographer,[1][5] and his first published photograph was of Veronica Lake, who was visiting Florida while on a war bonds tour.[2] Mitchell was an Army photographer during World War II, working in Italy.[2] In 1946, after returning home from the army, he set up his first studio in New Smyrna Beach.[1] In 1949, when he was 24, at the invitation of Ted Shawn, he visited Jacob's Pillow Dance and became interested in dance photography, which became a specialty.[2][5] He moved his studio to New York City in 1950.[6] He was the American Ballet Theatre's official photographer.[2] Starting in the 1961 he spent decades photographing the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, producing over 10,000 images of the company;[2][5] Ailey's biographer Jennifer Dunning credited Mitchell's work for "help[ing] to sell the company early on".[5] Mitchell also photographed dancers of the Boston Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Pennsylvania Ballet, Houston Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet.[6] Mitchell shot over 160 covers for Dance Magazine;[2] his 168th cover was published in July 2003.[4] His term for what he was attempting to capture with dance photography was "moving stills."[5] He was known as a lighting expert.[2][5] Mitchell also photographed other artists, entertainers, musicians, and writers, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono just a month before Lennon was murdered.[2] Other subjects included Leonard Bernstein, David Byrne, Truman Capote, Anthony Quinn, Jack Nicholson, Patti LuPone, Keith Haring, Neil Simon, Angela Lansbury, Twyla Tharp, Ned Rorem, Leontyne Price, Alfred Hitchcock, Spalding Gray, Ann Reinking, Andy Warhol, and Natalie Wood.[2] He spent a decade photographing Gloria Swanson.[5] His work appeared in The New York Times, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Life, Newsweek, People, Rolling Stone, Time, Vanity Fair and Vogue, among others.[2][4][6] Mitchell was the subject of a 2006 documentary, My Life is Black and White, directed by Craig Highberger.[2] His books include Icons & Idols (1998), for which Edward Albee wrote the foreword,[2][4] and a book of his Alvin Ailey photography...

Victor Arimondi (1942-2001). Portrait, ca. 1975. Period print measures 11 x 14 inches. Artist studio stamp on verso. Victor Arimondi (November 8, 1942 – July 24, 2001) was an Italian American photographer and model who lived and worked in Europe before moving to the United States in the late 1970s. His early fashion photography, his portraits of Grace Jones and other artists, and his male nudes photographed in New York and San Francisco captured the pre-AIDS culture of the 1970s and early 1980s. Arimondi's nudes were collected in several books, including David Leddick's award-winning[1] The Male Nude, (New York: Taschen 1998, 2005 and 2015). The photographer's later work documented homeless individuals in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood and the toll of the AIDS epidemic on the city. His photographs, featured in several posthumous exhibitions, also are in the collections of Sweden's museum of modern art, Moderna Museet, and San Francisco's GLBT Historical Society. Biography Arimondi was born Vittorio Maria Tevitti to his unwed mother, Alessandra Calligaris, in Bologna, Italy on November 8, 1942. His mother struggled financially, which left an impression on her only child. In 1948, she temporarily left him at a children's boarding school and orphanage in Italy to move to Sweden for a job. There she met and married Bruno Arimondi, who adopted her son. The family returned to Naples, Italy in 1952 where Victor graduated from high school.[1] In 1960, Arimondi returned to Sweden to study at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, although he did not graduate. Meanwhile, he worked at several blue collar jobs, including as a mailman, before he gave up on traditional full-time work to pursue what he considered more essential— a life of creative expression. He created costume-like clothing for himself and friends and at age 19 became a fashion model. Even as a teenager, the Italian born photographer who spent his 20s and 30s primarily based in Sweden, noted that he preferred fantasy to the trials of real life.[1] That conflict, and his passion for beauty as well as his sexual energy, were major factors in his life and his work.[2] From 1965 through 1972 Arimondi worked as model in London, Milan, Germany, New York and Stockholm, appearing in catalogs and fashion magazines including Vogue , Harper's Bazaar and Esquire and on the runway in several Valentino fashion shows. In 1972 he decided to try working on the other side of the lens as a photographer to better express his creativity.[2] Arimondi moved to New York in 1979 and continued to build his photography portfolio. Portrait of Bearded Man, New York City, 1979 Two years later, in 1981, he moved to San Francisco where he lived and worked for twenty years until his death of AIDS at age 58 on July 24, 2001. The year he moved to San Francisco, Arimondi opened a photo gallery in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for a short time. When he struggled financially, he gave up on trying to earn a living through commercial fashion photography and closed the gallery.[3] Arimondi returned to modeling for the financial benefits, though he did so on less of an international scale than in his early years. He continued to create photographic portraits of the denizens of the San Francisco gay and arts cultures, to shoot male nudes and publish his work in magazines, and he began to compose and photograph evocative still lifes using his own photographic images. Many of them touched on the death of dozens of his former photography models from AIDS. Arimondi was in the midst of a new photography project that brought together his background as a fashion photographer and his more recent social documentary work when he died several months after he learned he was HIV-positive.[4] The project featured his former colleague, haute couture cover model Ivy Nicholson,[5] who he found living homeless in San Francisco. Several of the haunting portraits he took of her were later included in a noted group exhibit at SF Camerawork. Art Arimondi's early photography in the 1970s in Stockholm included portraits of the stars of Sweden's fashion, theater and dance worlds. His first two photography exhibits were in Stockholm and met with mixed reviews. But as he matured as a photographer and tapped into his fashion world contacts, Arimondi landed a number of commercial fashion jobs, including shooting for the Italian designer Salvatore Ferragamo S.p.A.'s I.Magnin department store ad that ran in Vogue. Marlboro Man Nude, New York City,1980. He also shot other artists and models for his own portfolio, including Grace Jones, the Norwegian actress, Liv Ullmann, and the American writer, Norman Mailer. Arimondi's aesthetic vision was focused on fantasy and drama, and he prided himself on pushing limits.[6] Although less well-known than his San Francisco contemporary...