Jack Mitchell Photographic Portrait of Modern Dance Icon Martha Graham Original Vintage Signed 1973.
Photograph is 11 x 14 inches gelatin silver on heavy photographic paper.
Signed, studio stamped and dated 1973 on verso.
Jack Mitchell (1925 - 2013) was an American photographer of artists, dancers, film and theater performers, musicians and writers. He is hailed as one of the most important dance photographers of the 20th century. His work appeared in major newspapers and on the cover of major magazines, including over 160 covers of Dance Magazine. The Smithsonian called him “the benchmark by which other dance photographers assessed their own work”.
Mitchell photographed John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 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, Natalie Wood, and Gloria Swanson. His work appeared in The New York Times, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Life, Newsweek, People, Rolling Stone, Time, Vanity Fair and Vogue, among others.
Martha Graham (1894 – 1991) was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her style, the Graham technique, reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide.
Graham danced and taught for over seventy years. She was the first dancer to perform at the White House, travel abroad as a cultural ambassador, and receive the highest civilian award of the US: the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction. In her lifetime she received honors ranging from the Key to the City of Paris to Japan's Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. She said, in the 1994 documentary The Dancer Revealed: "I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.” Founded in 1926 (the same year as Graham's professional dance company), the Martha Graham School is the oldest school of dance in the United States.
Graham has been termed the "Picasso of Dance" in that her importance and influence to modern dance can be considered equivalent to what Pablo Picasso was to modern visual arts. Her impact has been also compared to the influence of Stravinsky on music and Frank Lloyd Wright on architecture.