Jay Maisel

Jay Maisel was born in Brooklyn on January 18, 1931, and grew into one of the defining American color photographers of the late twentieth century. He studied design and painting under Leon Friend at Abraham Lincoln High School, continued at Cooper Union, and later worked with Bauhaus master Josef Albers and inventor Buckminster Fuller at Yale. Informal study with Herbert Matter and a class with Alexey Brodovitch sharpened an eye already trained in painting. He began freelancing as a photographer in 1954 and had an early gallery show of black-and-white work by the mid-1950s.

Commercial success followed quickly. Maisel photographed advertising and editorial assignments that placed him among the most hired color shooters of his era. His credits include five Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers, the first two covers of New York magazine, and a long United Technologies advertising relationship. The image that followed him longest was his Miles Davis portrait used on the cover of Kind of Blue (1959), still among the best-known jazz album photographs ever made. He also photographed Marilyn Monroe and other public figures, yet peers often said his truest subject was ordinary life: a wall, a rope, a passerby, a cab in hot light.

In 1966 he bought the historic Germania Bank Building at 190 Bowery for about $102,000 when the neighborhood was in deep decline. The six-story, roughly 35,000-square-foot landmark, with dozens of rooms, became home, studio, warehouse of found objects, and, for many younger photographers, a pilgrimage site. New York magazine later called the purchase maybe the greatest real-estate coup of all time. Maintenance costs ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In February 2015 he sold the building for $55 million to developer Aby Rosen. Stephen Wilkes, Maisel mentee of decades, filmed the emptying of the bank; the feature documentary Jay Myself (Oscilloscope Laboratories, theatrical 2019) turned that move into a portrait of an artist facing time, change, and the end of a New York era.

Maisel stopped taking commercial assignments in the late 1990s and poured energy into personal work, print sales, lectures, and workshops. From 2008 to 2015 he hosted workshops inside the Bowery building, teaching hundreds of students. His teaching mantra condensed into three words: light, gesture, and color. Books including Light, Gesture, and Color and It's Not About the F-Stop carried that philosophy into print. He remained a fierce advocate for photographers' rights and copyright, blunt, funny, cigar in hand, telling students to protect their images as they would protect their children.

Honors accumulated across decades: Art Directors Club Hall of Fame; American Society of Media Photographers lifetime recognition; International Center of Photography Infinity Award; Lucie Lifetime Achievement; induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 2020. He was a lifelong Nikon photographer; after his death Nikon publicly honored him as a teacher and industry shaper.

A documented controversy came in 2011 when Andy Baio's chiptune tribute album Kind of Bloop used an image based on Maisel's Kind of Blue cover. Maisel's attorneys sought damages and removal; the dispute settled out of court for $32,500, becoming a widely cited fair-use and remix case study.

Maisel married Linda Adam (often called L.A.) in 1989. Their daughter Amanda was born in 1993 and later wrote publicly about her father's photographs of her childhood. Stephen Wilkes memorial remarks also named Jeffrey among those close to the family. Maisel died on August 20, 2026, at age 95. Cause of death was not made public. Tributes from Wilkes, Adorama colleagues, ASMP leaders, and photography press remembered a man who made the ordinary extraordinary and who kept looking until the end.