Herbert Migdoll was part of the DNA of the Joffrey Ballet.
As the dance company’s photographer, he captured graceful forms for more than 50 years.
He met Robert Joffrey, one of the company’s founders, during a chance encounter in the 1960s at a pharmacy in New York City. Mr. Migdoll was an artist, and the two men bonded over the bustling Greenwich Village arts scene.
Mr. Migdoll joined the company in 1968 and later moved with it to Los Angeles, where it was based for a decade, before the Joffrey landed in Chicago in 1995.
By that time, both Joffrey and the company’s other founder, Gerald Arpino, had died, and Mr. Migdoll was one of the few remaining links to the renowned dance company’s earliest days.
“Herb really brought continuity for the company, he was a real important link, much a part of its DNA,” said Christopher Clinton Conway, the company’s former executive director.
Friends said Mr. Migdoll died April 19 in New York City, several weeks after suffering a stroke. He was 90.
Mr. Migdoll carried his camera everywhere, traveled with the company and was ubiquitous at performances.
“He was everywhere; he’d be in a box, on the floor, in the wings,” Conway said.
His iconic images appeared on the covers of The New York Times, Life, Time and Dance Magazine.
Mr. Migdoll had an art studio on Chicago’s West Side. His chief mediums were photography and paint, and he often blended the two. His work appeared in galleries, at the Chicago Cultural Center and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 2002, Mr. Migdoll created an 8-foot-tall, 275-foot-long mural of swimming Joffrey Ballet stars that was installed just above the waterline along the north bank of the Chicago River near Michigan Avenue. He called the piece “Swimmers.” The images for the mural, taken by him of the dancers as they swam, were enlarged and transferred to vinyl mesh. Mr. Migdoll then splashed silver paint on them from a bucket.
He told the Sun-Times at the time he hoped the piece gave a “strong linear sensation of liquid flowing through the piece rather than just the bodies.”
Ashley Wheater, artistic director of the Joffrey, said Mr. Migdoll was always pushing the envelope in his quest for new ideas through which he could showcase dancers.
“He’s certainly left an indelible mark,” Wheater said.
Nick Gibson, a former audio engineer at the Joffrey, said Mr. Migdoll “was a fine artist who masqueraded as a photographer.”
Former Joffrey principal dancer Fabrice Calmels — who sports a uniquely tall build in the world of ballet, credits the Joffrey with giving him the chance to use his height in performances and credits Mr. Migdoll with using his camera to capture the beauty of his tall frame seamlessly flowing opposite smaller counterparts on the stage.
“He was really a genius, he was such a creative mind. I don’t know how to really explain this: Some people simply do things, but Herb was truly an artist first. He captured things he thought were beautiful and knew how to embellish them in such a way that everyone could see this beauty,” Calmels said.
Mr. Migdoll photographed dancers at various locations around the city, including at Cloud Gate (better known as The Bean) and on the carousel at Navy Pier.
“Herb appreciated everyone at the Joffrey and knew everyone was an asset,” Calmels said. “He was never a jerk; he could have easily been impossible to deal with, like a lot of people who have seniority. But he adored everyone and treated everyone with maximum respect and love.”
“He was such a sweet man, like a little gnome,” said former Joffrey dancer Charthel Arthur Estner.
“The actual nutcracker doll in Mr. Joffrey’s ‘Nutcracker’ production that ran for many, many years, its face was designed after Herb’s face,” she said.
Keith Prisco, a carpenter who used to work at the Joffrey, said Mr. Migdoll had the best stories.
“He told me once about how he approached Playboy magazine and convinced them to do a photo shoot in Jamaica with a couple of Joffrey dancers. And while they were down there, they partied too much and lost track of time, barely shot any photos. So before they left, Herb shot them in this lily pool at the hotel they were staying, and Playboy loved the photos and put them in the magazine,” Prisco recalled.
Mr. Migdoll was born May 11, 1934, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He moved to New York City to study architecture at Pratt Institute, then painting at The Cooper Union college, according to the New York Public Library, which has some of Mr. Migdoll’s photos in its collection.
Mr. Migdoll took classes at New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was offered a Fulbright scholarship to study photography in Denmark but declined, instead joining the bohemian scene of 1960s New York City.
Perhaps his best-known image is one he created from the Joffrey’s production of “Astarte,” which appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1968.
Editors at the magazine told Mr. Migdoll his image would make the cover if former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose health was in decline at the time and was possibly near death, remained alive at the time of publication. Joffrey and Mr. Migdoll went to church and spent entire nights praying for the president’s recovery, friends recalled.