Born in Brooklyn in 1931, Jay Maisel – the photographer behind one of the most famous album covers ever shot – has died at 95. Tributes have poured in, both for his work and the way he taught. And in those tributes, there's one small detail that really stood out for me.
Stephen Wilkes, the photographer who directed a 2018 film about Maisel's life, told the story of how their relationship began. As a junior at Syracuse University, Wilkes saw three images in a Time-Life book that stopped him cold. So he looked up the person who'd taken them (Maisel), and called him.
Maisel picked up the phone himself. When Wilkes left college, he became his associate. That one conversation, Wilkes says, changed his life. It also turned into a 50-year friendship.
To put all this in context, Maisel was, at this point, already one of America's most successful commercial photographers. He didn't need to take a call from an undergraduate he'd never met. He just did.
Why his pictures matter
Maisel hadn't come to photography cold: he studied painting and graphic design at Cooper Union before finishing at Yale, where he studied color theory under the artist Josef Albers. That background shows in his work today. Maisel didn't just point a camera at a scene, he composed it; like a painter might built a canvas from colour, shape and contrast. Then he stood back, and waited for an enticing moment to fall into that structure.
Above: trailer for the film Jay Myself
His most famous image was his 1959 portrait of Miles Davis. Famed for its deep blue shadow and a single shaft of light on the trumpet, the shot featured on the cover of Kind of Blue, which remains the best-selling jazz album ever made.
It's iconic because it doesn't just show a man playing an instrument, it brings a sound to life. Not an easy trick to pull off, and one that few photographers have repeated since.
Maisel built a commercial career on the same instinct, shooting five Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers and the first two covers of New York Magazine. But it was his personal work, ordinary street scenes shot with an extraordinary eye for light, gesture and colour, that are most studied today.
He didn't set out to capture dramatic scenes. In contrast, he wanted to show that a fire escape, a puddle or a stranger crossing the street could be just as compelling. That belief earned him lifetime achievement honours from the International Center of Photography, the American Society of Media Photographers and the Lucie Foundation, among others, and it's the same belief he spent decades trying to pass on to others.
He turned his home, a six-storey former bank on the Bowery into a place where students, assistants and curious photographers regularly turned up. It doubled as a studio and a personal archive of objects he'd collected, and apparently had an open door for anyone who fancied wandering in.
Sharing his knowledge
He eventually sold the building in 2015 for $55 million, reportedly the largest private residential sale in New York City's history to that point, and this ultimately led to Wilkes's 2018 documentary, which followed Maisel as he emptied out his collections.
Maisel led workshops for years, less to make money than as a labour of love: teaching beginners the same principles of light, gesture and colour that shaped his own pictures. That combination of jobbing photographer and inspirational teacher is what makes his death feel like such a loss.
Few photographers leave behind truly great pictures. Fewer still leave behind a way of looking that will continue to drive the people they met, taught and inspired for decades to come. He will be missed.
