Updated

Updated · The Washington Post · Sep 12

Photographer Jay Maisel Dies at 95, Leaving Miles Davis Cover and 55-Year Bowery Legacy

Updated

Updated · The Washington Post · Sep 12

Photographer Jay Maisel Dies at 95, Leaving Miles Davis Cover and 55-Year Bowery Legacy

Q: Why did a master of traditional cameras spend his final years shooting artistic masterpieces on a simple smartphone?

He used a smartphone because, by the end of his life, physical limits made traditional cameras hard to handle, but his drive to keep seeing and making pictures never faded. Maisel’s daughter said he continued shooting into his 90s and turned to an iPhone when arthritis made it uncomfortable to hold a camera. That shift was practical, not philosophical surrender. For a photographer who was famous for always carrying a camera and for preaching alertness and patience, the phone was simply the tool that allowed him to keep working despite age and illness. It also fit his artistic approach. Maisel was less obsessed with equipment than with what he called “light, gesture and color.” His career showed that his real gift was noticing visual drama in ordinary life — puddles, signs, reflections, clutter, street corners — and a smartphone was well suited to that kind of constant, immediate seeing. It was light, always at hand, and allowed him to respond instantly when something caught his eye. In that sense, the phone did not diminish his art; it extended it. Even after a career that included photographing Miles Davis for the cover of *Kind of Blue*, magazine covers, advertising campaigns and decades of street work, Maisel remained committed to the same principle: the best camera was the one that let him keep paying attention. His final years with an iPhone underscored the lesson he spent a lifetime teaching younger photographers — vision mattered more than gear.

3 articles · Updated · The Washington Post · Sep 12

Jay Maisel died Aug. 20 at 95 at his Brooklyn home after chronic lymphocytic leukemia and later bladder and prostate cancer, his family said.
Maisel built a seven-decade career around color, light and gesture, from New York jazz clubs in the 1950s to commercial campaigns, books and teaching hundreds of photographers.
His best-known work included the cover image for Miles Davis's 1959 album "Kind of Blue," along with portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Louis Armstrong and other cultural figures.
In 1966 he bought the 35,000-square-foot Germania Bank Building for $102,000 and lived there nearly 50 years before selling it for $55 million in 2015.
Even after arthritis limited his grip, Maisel kept shooting on an iPhone into his early 90s, reflecting a lifelong creed to photograph whatever moved him.