Icons & Idols

For thirty-five years, almost everyone who was anyone in the arts found themselves in Jack Mitchell's photography studio in New York City. This book distills the finest results of Mitchell's own artistic mission to portray the greatest actors, dancers, painters, composers, writers, choreographers, and musicians of his day.
Mitchell's list of subjects is a crash course in late twentieth-century art, including such luminaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lauren Bacall, Alfred Hitchcock, Twyla Tharp, Jack Nicholson, Robert Rauschenberg, Meryl Streep, Luciano Pavarotti, Uta Hagen, Tommy Tune, Julie Andrews, Philip Glass, and on, and on.
In the sixties, his self-assigned goal of photographing the greatest painters and sculptors living in New York - for example, Isamu Noguchi, Louise Nevelson, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg - led to a retrospective exhibit in 1974.
Although the photographs that follow speak for themselves, captions accompany each one, providing a time-capsule context. Mitchell's wry sense of humor peeks out from behind the lens in these anecdotes about America's greatest living (and sometimes now deceased) legends.