A Long Overdue Look at James O. Mitchell’s Expressive and Evocative Portraits

When Diane di Prima, one of the only female poets of the Beat Generation, passed away in October 2020, countless obituaries detailed her distinctive literary voice and her unwavering, often eccentric, view of the world. Remembrances were often illustrated with an introspective and somber portrait of di Prima—the same image that adorned multiple editions of her celebrated book Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969). Similarly, several anthologies on the Beat movement (including the catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1996 exhibition Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965) feature an image of Jack Kerouac smoking in a casually unbuttoned striped shirt on one of his more sober days. These portraits of di Prima and Kerouac appear to successfully capture the personalities of each writer at a pivotal era in their lives. What holds these two images of Beat icons in common? The inimitable person behind the camera: James Oliver Mitchell.

At times credited as “Jim” or “James O.,” Mitchell was best known as a chronicler of writers in New York and San Francisco. He was obsessive and prolific, working with the photographic medium from age ten to eighty-seven. Yet his name is relatively unknown. The photography world has largely ignored him: a Black photographer with a fairly abrasive personality and an oeuvre that resists easy categorization. Despite his early accolades and impressive resume, he never published a monograph nor had a large-scale exhibition. He died in January 2021 in relative obscurity, only a few months after his friend di Prima.

I first learned of Mitchell’s work in 2019, when Lawrence Rinder, the former director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, mentioned he was considering acquiring Mitchell’s photograph of Diane di Prima. I later visited Mitchell in early 2020 and was welcomed into his Oakland, California apartment, a cramped space that was a splendor of floor-to-ceiling stacks of photography books, magazines, negatives, and prints. It quickly became clear that photography sustained him; his passion for and knowledge of the medium was a marvel, and he told stories of his career and artistry with intense vigor. Through our discussions, I was able to piece together his early years: especially the decades between 1960 and 1980, during which he formally trained in art schools, intersected with various creatives, and experimented with his photographic vision and printing.

Mitchell was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1933, but his family moved to New York when he was a child. His mother gifted him a camera for his tenth birthday, and he immediately took to photography. Mitchell’s aunt and uncle, who lived in Harlem, were photographed (though not named) by well-known Photo League photographer Aaron Siskind in 1940 for his portfolio Harlem Document. Mitchell later noted this connection with great pride, as a personal link to a momentous series in the history of photography and an informative study for documentary-style imagery of a people and a place.

While enrolled at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, Mitchell took a course with Lisette Model at the New School, where she began teaching in 1951. Model encouraged him to apply to the San Francisco Art Institute, but before doing so he left New York to serve in the military. Upon his return in the late 1950s, he mounted a small exhibition at Leica Gallery and was included in a group show at Limelight Gallery. Finally able to take Model’s advice, he applied to and enrolled in SFAI in 1960 on the GI Bill. There, he studied with Brett Weston and Ansel Adams and became close with Ralph Gibson.

Mitchell’s evolving photographic sensibilities led him to photograph Harlem, a subject he captured from his high-school days into his mid-thirties. His archive is rife with street photography of his former neighborhood, scenes that move between the jubilance of children as they played outdoors, idiosyncrasies of Harlem buildings and signage, and a consistent expression of moments in the minutiae of daily life. Both taken in 1964, the untitled photographs of Sarah’s Beauty Salon and Fish & Chips restaurant are scenes of Harlem captured just after Mitchell graduated from SFAI. Here we see the slow unveiling of lives, suggesting Mitchell’s need to immerse himself in the familiarity of swells of Black folk pouring in and out of local businesses.

Mitchell seems particularly keen to capture the expressions of Black women, a responsive, nonverbal language most legible and cherished among fellow Black folk.

During this time, Mitchell was working for both Magnum Photos and the short-lived Suffolk Sun newspaper, trying to support himself, his wife, and children as a freelance photographer. In one image, the words Beauty Salon hover above a trio of Black women who seem disinterested or unaware of Mitchell. Framing them with the advertisements and signs of the storefronts, Mitchell captures the contrasting patterns of the three women’s dresses—the planes of their skirts fold atop one another linking their distinct styles: pinstripe, plain, and floral print. In this moment Mitchell cites his photographic influences—Siskind, Model, and Dorothea Lange (whom he briefly worked for in the Bay Area), but we can also see the impact of one of his earliest photography commissions as a cameraman for the famed Alvin Ailey dance group.

Connecting Harlem residents to the sinewy bodies of the Black ballerinas, Mitchell is attuned to the silhouettes and shapes of fabric as it falls and accentuates curved Black bodies in motion. The facial expression of the leftmost woman was a carefully chosen moment, as evidenced by his contact sheet for the scene. Such attention to exaggerated faces is perhaps an echo of Model, but Mitchell seems particularly keen to capture the expressions of Black women, a responsive, nonverbal language most legible and cherished among fellow Black folk. (This is also a theme in works by contemporary Black artists including Martine Syms and Rashaad Newsome).

Learning to photograph expressive movement was a pivotal development in Mitchell’s career, but the process was not without disappointments. It was with much vehemence that he shared with me his experiences with photographer Garry Winogrand. In the early 1960s, he and Winogrand frequently shot at the same dance studios; once, Mitchell assisted the famous photographer on assignment. Mitchell described that in each circumstance Winogrand blatantly ignored him, making the young photographer feel painfully invisible. “He was a real racist,” Mitchell told me of his interactions with Winogrand.

Mitchell permanently moved to the California Bay Area in the 1970s, and it was around this time that his street photography began to shift. While we see in photographs—such as in these two geometric street scenes—an outdated voyeurism of a man photographing women without their consent, we must also recognize the politics of a Black man wielding a camera in public. Mitchell optimized his invisibility while simultaneously making himself vulnerable to the hypervisibility of a loitering. In one image Mitchell offers a visual comment on beauty and race, capturing an incredible moment of separation and comparison created by the structure of a phone booth. In another instance, a shadow enters a brightly lit, angular frame to haunt disembodied, pale legs. Once again, the positionality of the “unseen” photographer holds much weight. Blackness is conceptualized as a mark upon United States history and experience and, as we know, Black men specifically have been articulated by white supremacist systems as a harrowing, shadowy threat that lurks in wait to harm white women.

In the early 1970s, Mitchell shifted from photographing Beat writers and aimed to immerse himself among talented Black cultural producers. Referencing Carl Van Vechten’s series Harlem Heroes, he set out to photograph what he identified as another wave of exceptional Black creativity based in the California Bay Area. In 1973 he received a small National Endowment for the Arts grant in support of this project, and he also submitted an unsuccessful application to the Guggenheim Fellowship for photography. The early stages of the series saw him photographing folks like the writer Ernest J. Gaines and the painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal. While the project was never realized, he took more than fifty portraits, some of which were reproduced in a sprinkling of local publications in the 1970s, such as the inaugural edition of Hambone, a literary journal initiated by the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University. Included in the volume was the portrait of O’Neal as well as a spread of photographs by Mitchell that succinctly spoke to his career as a portraitist and street photographer of both coasts.

Hambone’s inception at Stanford—the journal was named and brought to fruition by the poet Nathaniel Mackey—coincided with Mitchell’s own time at the university. In 1973 Stanford hired Mitchell to teach photography, a period in which he believed the university was fulfilling diversity quotas. Unclear to him was why just a year later his contract was not renewed. He was left to contemplate the factors that led to this decision. It seemed to him that the lingering reason was racism, and he shared with me that at this stage in his life he felt depressed.

The cover of the 1974 issue of Hambone features a self-portrait of a dour Mitchell shrouded in enveloping black shadows. Here is the meeting point between black as a color and Blackness as a Black photographer attempted to see himself. Mitchell was a bit of an anomaly among his Black male photographer peers—figures like Kwame Brathwaite, the always appreciated Roy DeCarava, and the men of the Kamoinge Workshop and Black Photographers of California clubs are not particularly known for self-portraits. Mitchell, however, obsessively contemplated his own visage, sitting before his camera throughout his career. He was not a member of a photography collective and we know he was friendly with and photographed the notoriously white Beat circle. He frequented and photographed art events, but such images read as if he were an ignored documenter weaving in and around predominantly white crowds. With this in mind, his self-portraits appear to suggest isolation: a prickly man reaching for a sense of self, grasping to comprehend how he sees himself and how the world sees him.

In 1965 Harlem, a young Mitchell sits before a cracking wall; he stares with mild intensity as he displays his camera and the rolled-up sleeves of a man who labors. A 1973 self-portrait composed during his MFA program at Lone Mountain College (now University of San Francisco) shows us a stern, sweatered Mitchell outlined by a square of light, his face only partially visible. A tight line up of test prints graces the upper edge of the intimate scene. In both self-portraits, Mitchell gestures to the complex slipperiness of identity, but one theme remains undisturbed: he wanted to be seen as a photographer. When I spoke with Mitchell, I appreciated that he was cantankerous and blunt, and that he refused to cower or bend to his audience. This wasn’t a personality of old age—it’s who he was. He wanted this candor to emanate from his self-portraits. Because Mitchell did not always perform the capitulating and ever-grateful Black person, he often found himself ostracized from the photography world. Though Mitchell is no longer with us, he has left behind a trove of images for us to learn from and critique. His love for the medium was fierce. We should endeavor to research and celebrate his life and photography with the same ferocity.