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Jay Maisel
Jay Maisel
Jay Maisel

Jay Maisel

Country: United States
Birth: 1931

Having studied painting and graphic design at Cooper Union and Yale, Jay Maisel embarked on his photographic career in 1954. While he boasts an impressive portfolio that includes iconic figures like Marilyn Monroe and Miles Davis, Maisel is renowned for his ability to capture the essence of light, color, and gesture in ordinary life.

Among his noteworthy commercial achievements are five Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers, the inaugural two covers of New York Magazine, the cover of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (the highest-selling jazz album of all time), twelve years of advertising collaboration with United Technologies, and accolades from esteemed organizations such as the International Center for Photography, American Society of Media Photographers, Art Directors Club, Professional Photographers of America, and The Cooper Union.

Although he ceased commercial work in the late '90s, Jay has persistently dedicated himself to personal projects. His reputation as a generous and inspiring teacher has grown through extensive lectures and photography workshops across the country. Additionally, he continues to make prints available, which can be found in private, corporate, and museum collections.

As people, we love pattern. But interrupted pattern is more interesting.

– Jay Maisel


Since he stopped taking on commercial work in 1995, Jay has continued to focus on his personal work. He has developed a reputation as a giving and inspiring teacher as a result of extensive lecturing and photography workshops throughout the country. He also hosted his own workshops at his residence at 190 Bowery in New York City, from 2008-2015, instructing more than 640 students over the eight-year period.

In 2015, Jay sold his famous six-story building where he lived and worked for 50 years. Stephen Wilkes documented Jay’s epic move out of “the Bank” that was released as a feature-length film, Jay Myself, in the summer of 2019.

Since 2015, Jay has committed himself to reviewing his last sixty years of shooting. The results can be seen on his website, jaymaisel.com. Jay continues to sell prints of his photographs, many of which can be found in private, corporate, and museum collections.

Source: International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Terry O’Neill
United Kingdom
1938 | † 2019
Terence Patrick O'Neill CBE (30 July 1938 – 16 November 2019) was a British photographer, known for documenting the fashions, styles, and celebrities of the 1960s. O'Neill's photographs capture his subjects candidly or in unconventional settings. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions. O'Neill was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2004 and the society's Centenary Medal in 2011. His work is held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. O'Neill was born to Irish parents in Romford, East London, and began his career working in a photographic unit for an airline at London's Heathrow Airport. During this time, he photographed a sleeping figure in a waiting area who, by happenstance, was revealed to be Home Secretary Rab Butler. O'Neill thereafter found further employment on Fleet Street with The Daily Sketch in 1959. His first professional job was to photograph Laurence Olivier. During the 1960s, in addition to photographing contemporary celebrities such as Judy Garland, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he also photographed members of the British royal family and prominent politicians, showing a more human side to these subjects than had usually been portrayed. O'Neill's photographs of Elton John are among his best known. A selection of them appeared in the 2008 book Eltonography. Also considered among his most famous images are a series of American actress Faye Dunaway (his girlfriend at the time) at dawn on 29 March 1977, lounging next to the swimming pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel the morning after winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for Network, with several newspapers scattered around her and her Oscar statuette prominently shown on a table beside her breakfast tray. The series was photographed in both colour and black and white. O'Neill was credited (as Terrence O'Neill) as an executive producer of the film Mommie Dearest (1981). His only other film credit was for still photography for the opera film Aria (1987). O'Neill was married to the actress Vera Day for 13 years; they had two children together, Keegan Alexander and Sarah Jane. He had a long-term relationship with Faye Dunaway; they were married for four years in the 1980s and had a son, Liam. In 2003, he was quoted in the U.S. tabloid magazine Star as saying Liam was adopted and not their biological son, contrary to Dunaway's public assertions. In 2001 O'Neill married Laraine Ashton, a former model agency executive. O'Neill underwent a triple bypass and, in 2006, an operation for bowel cancer. He died on 16 November 2019 at his home in London from prostate cancer, at the age of 81.Source: Wikipedia Terry O’Neill, British Photographer, gained renown documenting the fashions, styles, and celebrities of the 1960s. O’Neill’s photographs display his knack for capturing his subjects candidly or in unconventional settings. His intimate chronicling of the Swinging Sixties, thanks to friendships with the Beatles and Rolling Stones, made him a household name. Terry O’Neill’s career as a photographer began at the age of 22 and he was soon freelancing for some of the most famous magazines. His coveted work hangs in national galleries and private collections worldwide. Terry has produced covers for Time, Newsweek, Stern, Paris Match, The Sunday Times Magazine, Vanity Fair and many others over the course of his six-decade career. Since Terry first picked up a camera in 1958, he has photographed presidents, prime ministers, rock stars, Oscar winners and the British Royal Family. His work has delivered iconic movie posters, album covers and fashion plates for the world’s top designers. Terry O’Neill has chronicled the lives of emerging rock stars and icons of the 60s including David Bowie, Elton John, The Who, Eric Clapton, Chuck Berry and many others. He photographed The Beatles and The Rolling Stones when they were struggling young bands and worked closely with Frank Sinatra for over 30 years, being granted access to the legend back stage and in private. Former husband to legendary actress Faye Dunaway, his photograph of her in Beverley Hills, the morning after she won her Best Actress Oscar for Network, has been nominated as the most iconic Hollywood shot of all time. His photographs of Brigitte Bardot, Jean Shrimpton and Audrey Hepburn capture the charisma of these superstars at the peak of their careers.Source: Mouche Gallery
Nicholas Nixon
United States
1947
Nicholas Nixon is an American photographer, born in 1947 in Detroit, Michigan, known for his work in portraiture and documentary photography. Influenced by the photographs of Edward Weston and Walker Evans, he began working with large-format cameras. Whereas most professional photographers had abandoned these cameras in favor of shooting on 35 mm film with more portable cameras, Nixon preferred the format because it allowed prints to be made directly from the large format negatives, retaining the clarity and integrity of the image. Nixon has said "When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time, [unlike] early photography where time seemed non-changing. I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousand of a second the difference is very large." His first solo exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art curated by John Szarkowski in 1976. Nixon’s early city views taken of Boston and New York in the mid-seventies were exhibited at one of the most influential exhibitions of the decade, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in 1975. In the late nineties, Nixon returned to this subject matter to document Boston’s changing urban landscape during the Big Dig highway development project. In 1976, 1980, and 1987, Nixon was awarded National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships. In 1977 and 1986, he was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship. Nixon's subjects include schoolchildren and schools in and around Boston, people living along the Charles River near Boston and Cambridge as well as cities in the South, his family and himself, people in nursing homes, the blind, sick, and dying people, and the intimacy of couples. Nixon is also well known for his work People With AIDS, which began in 1987. Nixon recorded his subjects with meticulous detail in order to facilitate a connection between the viewer and the subject. In 1975, Nixon began his project, The Brown Sisters consisting of a single portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters each year, consistently posed in the same left to right order. As of 2020, there are forty-six portraits altogether. The series has been shown at the St. Louis Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth the National Gallery of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2010, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston organized the exhibition Nicholas Nixon: Family Album which included The Brown Sisters series among other portraits of his wife Bebe, himself and his children Sam and Clementine.Source: Wikipedia Nicholas Nixon is known for the ease and intimacy of his black and white large format photographs. Nixon has photographed porch life in the rural south, schools in and around Boston, cityscapes, sick and dying people, and the intimacy of couples. Recording his subjects close and with meticulous detail, he facilitates an emotional connection between the viewer and the subject. In 1975, he began an ongoing series, The Brown Sisters, an annual portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters unchangingly posed in the same order. This seminal project has been the subject of multiple publications and exhibitions. In Summer 2013, Nixon’s book Close Far was released by Steidl. The body of work explores the self in physical and psychological proximity to the urban landscape. On the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s The Brown Sisters series, in 2014, the complete sequence of images was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and re-published in an anniversary catalogue. In 2017, Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid opened a comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, accompanied by a catalogue illustrating over 200 images, and the ICA Boston mounted a chronological retrospective exhibition. In 2021, Galerie Le Château d’Eau in Toulouse mounted an ambitious survey exhibition, accompanied by an expanded catalogue.Source: Fraenkel Gallery
Martin Munkácsi
Hungary
1896 | † 1963
Martin Munkácsi (born Mermelstein Márton; Kolozsvár, Hungary, May 18, 1896; died July 13, 1963, New York, NY) was a Hungarian photographer who worked in Germany (1928–34) and the United States, where he was based in New York City. Munkácsi was a newspaper writer and photographer in Hungary, specializing in sports. At the time, sports action photography could only be done in bright light outdoors. Munkácsi's innovation was to make sports photographs as meticulously composed action photographs, which required both artistic and technical skill. Munkácsi's legendary big break was to happen upon a fatal brawl, which he photographed. Those photos affected the outcome of the trial of the accused killer, and gave Munkácsi considerable notoriety. That notoriety helped him get a job in Berlin in 1928, for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, where his first published photo was a race car splashing its way through a puddle. He also worked for the fashion magazine Die Dame. More than just sports and fashion, he photographed Berliners, rich and poor, in all their activities. He traveled to Turkey, Sicily, Egypt, London, New York, and famously Liberia, for photo spreads in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. The speed of the modern age and the excitement of new photographic viewpoints enthralled him, especially flying. There are aerial photographs; there are air-to-air photographs of a flying school for women; there are photographs from a Zeppelin, including the ones on his trip to Brazil, where he crosses over a boat whose passengers wave to the airship above. On March 21, 1933, he photographed the fateful Day of Potsdam, when the aged President Paul von Hindenburg handed Germany over to Adolf Hitler. On assignment for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, he photographed Hitler's inner circle, although he was a Jewish foreigner. In 1934, the Nazis nationalized the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, fired its Jewish editor-in-chief, Kurt Korff, and replaced its innovative photography with pictures of German troops. Munkácsi left for New York, where he signed on, for a substantial $100,000, with Harper's Bazaar, a top fashion magazine. In a change from usual practice, he often left the studio to shoot outdoors, on the beach, on farms and fields, at an airport. He produced one of the first articles in a popular magazine to be illustrated with nude photographs. His portraits include Katharine Hepburn, Leslie Howard, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Jane Russell, Louis Armstrong, and the definitive dance photograph of Fred Astaire. Munkácsi died in poverty and controversy. Several universities and museums declined to accept his archives, and they were scattered around the world. Berlin's Ullstein Archives and Hamburg's F. C. Gundlach collection are home to two of the largest collections of Munkácsi's work.Source: Wikipedia
Alice Boughton
United States
1866 | † 1943
Alice Boughton (14 May 1866 - 21 June 1943) was an early 20th-century American photographer known for her photographs of many literary and theatrical figures of her time. She was a Fellow of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession, a circle of photographers whose artistic efforts succeeded in raising photography to a fine art form. Alice Boughton was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 14 May 1866. Her parents were Frances Ayres and William H. Boughton, a lawyer in New York. As educational opportunities were made more available in the 19th-century, women artists became part of professional enterprises, including founding their own art associations. Artwork made by women was considered to be inferior, and to help overcome that stereotype women became "increasingly vocal and confident" in promoting women's work, and thus became part of the emerging image of the educated, modern and freer "New Woman". Artists then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplyfying this emerging type through their own lives." In the 1880s, Boughton began studying art and photography at the Pratt School of Art and Design. It was there that she met fellow student Gertrude Käsebier, with whom she later studied in Paris. Käsebier also employed her an assistant in her studio, most likely at the same time Boughton was studying at Pratt. In 1890, she opened her own portrait studio on East 23rd Street in New York, which she maintained for the next forty years. In 1904, she sent a letter to William Butler Yeats that listed a studio address on Madison Avenue, indicating that she established or used more than one studio for at least a brief period. Around 1901, Boughton studied art in Rome and photography in Paris, where she worked in Käsebier's summer studio. She won an honorable mention for her work at the Turin International Decorative and Fine Arts Exhibition in 1902. It is not known when she met Alfred Stieglitz, but it is clear he knew of and admired her work by 1902 when he included two of her works in the inaugural exhibition at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York City. Four years later, in 1906, Boughton was appointed by Stieglitz as a Fellow of the Photo-Secession. The following year Stieglitz gave her, along with fellow photographers C. Yarnall Abbot and William B. Dyer, an exhibition at the Little Galleries. In 1909 she had six of her photographs and an essay called "Photography, A Medium of Expression" published in Stieglitz's journal Camera Work (No 26, April, 1909). During this same period, her photographs were included in major exhibitions around the world, including shows in London, Paris, Vienna, The Hague and New York. Boughton became one of the most distinguished portrait photographers of New York, although she did many landscapes in this country and Europe including the famous Rockefeller estate Kykuit at Pocantico Hills, New York. She produced studies of children, as well as female nudes in allegorical or natural settings. Among her more famous works are portraits of Eugene O'Neill, Albert Pinkham Ryder, George Arliss and Robert Louis Stevenson. Her portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson was an inspiration for John Singer Sargent's own portrait of the writer. From at least 1920 until her death, Boughton shared her residences with artist and art teacher Ida C. Haskell (1861-1932). Haskell is known to have been an instructor at Pratt while Käsebier and Boughton studied there. When Boughton traveled to Europe in 1926, Haskell, her partner, accompanied her on the trip. In 1931, Boughton closed her studio and discarded thousands of prints. She moved permanently to the home in Brookhaven, Long Island, that she shared with Haskell. Boughton died of pneumonia on 21 June 1943. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British National Portrait Gallery, the U.S. National Portrait Gallery, the George Eastman House and other important museums.Source: Wikipedia
Maureen Ruddy Burkhart
United States
1954
My creative quest has always been about the 'journey' as opposed to the 'destination'. The first is experiential, alive, organic; that latter seems rushed. I grew up in places that I now see as exotic, but at the time I just thought it was terribly inconvenient and definitely too far from friends back 'home'. In 1971, at age 17, I left Iran, after three years, in tears and some relief. I immediately thought 'why didn't I take any pictures there?'. I fell in love with that country and its people, but I would not be going back (at least, not yet!). Holding onto what memories I had taken with me, I vowed this would not happen again. So I enrolled in the SFAI. Many years have unfolded since then, and I've been a filmmaker (when 'film' was film), a writer/director, an I.Q. tester, stock photographer, and a documentary and fine art photographer. My most seminal work to date, in terms of how it changed my worldly perceptions, came after spending some three years on and off working for a documentary project in the Kibera slum of Kenya. "Kibera: A Slice of Heaven" earned numerous international awards and press, but my favorite was a local 'Artist of the Year' in Longmont, Colorado. The Firehouse Art Center curator, Jessica Kooiman Parker, called it an 'act of bravery'. Reflecting on that, I realized that bravery is a way to change the world AND the photographer, one heart at a time. The power of photography is truly unlimited. Amidst a crazy world (and always being on the move), I developed a love of landscape photography. Most people acknowledge that nature can be a place of solace and inspiration. While it is definitely the same for me, I've been creating 'scenes' from nature. I often photograph the same landscape over and over, taking my favorite parts of the series and compositing them into a singular landscape that mimics my relationship to it. It's fantasy, whimsy, and hope. In my darker landscapes, there's a moody melancholia…but I never lose sight of the hope. ARTICLES: Exclusive Interview Allegories of Melancholy Garden of Delights Interview About Til Death
Edouard Boubat
France
1923 | † 1999
Edouard Boubat (September 13, 1923, Paris, France – June 30, 1999, Paris) was a French art photographer. Boubat was born in Montmartre, Paris. He studied typography and graphic arts at the Ecole Estienne, and then worked for a printing company before becoming a photographer after WWII. He took his first photograph in 1946 and was awarded the Kodak Prize the following year. Afterwards he travelled the world for the magazine Réalités. The French poet Jacques Prévert called him a "Peace Correspondent." His son Bernard is also a photographer. Source: Wikipedia Edouard Boubat was born in Montmartre, Paris in 1923. He studied typography and graphic arts at the Ecole Estienne. Edouard Boubat's interest in photography began after World War II. Public collections that hold his work include Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.Source: Jackson Fine Art Édouard Boubat, France’s most famous romantic photographer, was born in Paris on September 13, 1923. He grew up on the Rue Cyrano-de-Bergerac, Montmartre. As the son of an army chef, he heard many tales of the Great War, in which his father served as a cook on the front lines and was wounded three times. In 1938, Boubat attended the École Estienne, where he studied to become a photo-engraver, but in 1943, he was called up to serve two years of compulsory labour in a factory in Leipzig, Germany. Upon his return to Paris in 1946, Boubat sold his six-volume dictionary to fund the purchase of his first camera, a 6x6 Rolleicord. Boubat's approach to photography was deeply affected by World War II: "Because I know war… because I know the horror, I don’t want to add to it... After the war, we felt the need to celebrate life, and for me photography was the means to achieve this." Spanning a 50 year career, Boubat's photographs do just that. They celebrate the beauty, simplicity, and little things in life. His first professional photograph was taken in the Jardin du Luxembourg in 1946, “Little Girl with Dead Leaves,” a charming and magical shot. The following year, at the age of 24, Boubat exhibited the picture at the Salon International de la Photographie organized by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and was awarded the Kodak Prize. It was an amazing start to his career. The same year that he bought the Rolleicord Boubat met his future wife, Lella, of whom he took some of the most beautiful and emblematic photographs of the 20th century. In 1950, Boubat’s work was initially published by the Swiss magazine Caméra. Soon after, he became acquainted with the artistic director of the French magazine Realités. From then on, Boubat traveled the world for the prestigious magazine. His assignments often took him to poor and desolate regions, but Boubat still managed to capture only love and beauty. His special gift as a photojournalist was finding the common thread that linked the everyday life of people everywhere. For Boubat, photography meant meeting his fellow man. He loved to photograph humanity; his images bear witness to the specific relationship he had with his subjects, on which he commented: "We are living photographs. Photography reveals the images within us." In 1968, Boubat left Realités magazine, but continued to work on an independent basis. He tirelessly sought to bring the emotion and beauty of life to our gaze. Considered an heir of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” photography, Boubat had a rare talent for capturing those fleeting, magical moments that can only be immortalized by the confident eye of a true master. Boubat died in 1999 in Paris, leaving behind a remarkable collection of photography, on which he often philosophized: "Over a lifetime I have noticed that everything is woven together by chance encounters and special moments," he said. "A photograph gives you a deep insight into a moment, it recalls a whole world."Source: Duncan Miller Gallery
Gregory Spaid
United States
1946
Gregory Spaid (born, 1946) is an American artist who works in many modes and styles of photography, which are linked by a common thread of illuminating the commonplace. Whether it is the daily movement of pedestrians on the streets of New York City or the leaves that fall in his yard in rural Ohio, it is photography’s potential to transform our common experiences to reveal meaning and beauty that is the hallmark of his work. Spaid’s recent work includes a photography project that explores the importance trees play in our lives and for the health of the planet titled Reading Trees. His work on trees includes Cliché Verre photographs that incorporate actual leaves and other materials on negatives he makes by hand. For this project he traveled throughout the United States and has been awarded artist residencies at the Brush Creek Foundation in Wyoming, Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, Congaree National Park in South Carolina and the Sonoran Arts Residency in Ajo, Arizona. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he focused on the natural world much closer to home, within footsteps of where he lives, to produce a series of videos to share with friends, titled The Machine in the Garden, that take a close look at nature for the beauty and inspiration still to be found there. Since 2009, Spaid has photographed the dance-like movement of people on the street of New York City for a series of abstract images titled Pedestrians. His photography on the changing landscape of rural America was included in a major group exhibition at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles titled Where We Live. As well as the Getty Museum, his work is in other major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Italy and is the recipient of eight grants from the Ohio Art Council. Spaid has published two monographs: Grace: Photograph of Rural America and On Nantucket. In 2010, the Getty Museum published his work in an historical survey titled The Tree in Photography. Spaid taught studio art at Kenyon College where he served for nine years in academic administration including six years as the college’s provost. About Leaf Cutting Series "Leaves occur in such abundance where I live in rural Ohio as to seem worthless, and yet each one is astoundingly complex and beautiful both in its form and function. I think of the leaves in this series as visual representations of wildness, while the alterations I make to them -- the cutting -- is a form of rational human intervention. These images from my leaf cutting series are camera-less photographs made from negatives I make by hand -- a process known by the French term Cliché Verre. Cliché Verre is one of the earliest uses of light-sensitive, photographic materials. In the mid-19th century, it was used by a few French landscape painters, including Corot, Delacroix, Millet and Rousseau, to reproduce drawings they made on glass plates. My process is a hybrid one and an experimental contemporary version of that early process. After making a negative by hand, I scan it, process it digitally, and then print it as an archival ink jet print. Because there is no right or wrong way to make Cliché Verre images, I invent my technique as I work and let chance and discovery shape my approach. The subject of this work is leaves that I collect, make translucent, cut in unique shapes, and then combine with other materials (including maple syrup, blueberry juice, glue, India ink) to make hand-made 'negatives.'” -- Gregory Spaid
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Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #55 Women
Publish your work in our printed magazine and win $1,000 cash prizes