Herbert Migdoll, the official photographer and designer of the Joffrey Ballet for about half a century, who was admired for capturing the flight of its dancers with his lens, died on April 19 in the Bronx. He was 90.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by the Joffrey Ballet on its Facebook page and confirmed by his assistant, Joseph Rivera.
Mr. Migdoll’s images of the Chicago-based Joffrey Ballet’s dancers helped cement its artistic reputation from the time he joined the company, in 1968, until he retired, in 2016. He eventually became the Joffrey’s graphics director as well, helping to design posters and sets for such notable productions as “Billboards,” a 1993 ballet set to the music of Prince.
Simultaneously, he served as the art director of Dance Magazine, where he was responsible for dozens of covers from the 1970s through the ’90s. In a tribute on its Instagram page, the magazine described him as a visionary.
The Joffrey, in its own tribute, called Mr. Migdoll “an extraordinary artist whose vision and photography captured the evolving story of the Joffrey Ballet for more than five decades.” That photography appeared in The New York Times and Life magazine, among other publications.
Even before Mr. Migdoll officially joined the Joffrey, his mid-1960s experiments with time-lapse photography, capturing the soaring acrobatics of the ballet company’s dancers, had caught the attention of its founders, Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino.
“All I wanted to do was time-lapse,” Mr. Migdoll said in a 2017 talk at Northwestern University, for the Chicago Dance History Project, “which meant leaving the shutter open, and letting the dancer move through space, and whatever got caught was it.”
He added: “If it was beautiful, I kept it.”
One such series of images was impressive enough to make the cover of Time in 1968: a montage of Mr. Migdoll’s work documenting the Joffrey’s erotic ballet “Astarte.”
He considered it a breakthrough. “The idea of a cover on Time magazine,” he said, “was unbelievable.”
The ballet itself, a distinctively American blend of specially commissioned rock music — the psychedelic style then in vogue — film and eros, meshed perfectly with Mr. Migdoll’s sensibility.
“Bob wanted to bring film and ballet together at a time when interaction between the arts was a big thing,” he said in a 2002 interview in The Chicago Tribune.
Like Mr. Joffrey, he believed that “ballet could be an art form that grows out of the environment it is coming from,” he said. “Joffrey was very inclusive in his idea about what the ballet should be.”
Mr. Migdoll’s preoccupation with the human body in motion spilled over into yet another career — as a painter. Among his notable works was a 275-foot-long mural of Joffrey stars swimming; it was installed in 2002 above the waterline of the Chicago River. An earlier work, a 40-foot painting called “Swimming Dancer,” was exhibited at the 1995 Venice Biennale, floating in a Venetian canal.
“He had a passion for things in motion,” Fabrice Calmels, a lead dancer with the Joffrey, said in an interview. “Herb was putting us in the forefront, before we even reached the stage.”
For “Billboards” — described by the New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff as “the ultimate crossover ballet: a sprawling, clever reflection of the uneasy cultural mix of our time” — Mr. Migdoll designed billboards with images of the dancers that were arranged onstage so that they spelled out the names of the choreographers.
That work reflected Mr. Migdoll’s “crazy idea,” he told Northwestern students, that Joffrey and Arpino, “two middle-class Americans,” could create a ballet, and it “didn’t have to be from London, Paris or Russia to be exciting.”
Herbert Migdoll was born on May 11, 1934, in Jersey City, N.J., one of five children of Bessie and Louis Migdoll, an electrical contractor.
He studied architecture at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, and then painting at the Cooper Union, in Manhattan, graduating in 1957.
Mr. Migdoll began photographing the work of the Joffrey in 1965, when the company was still in New York, and he “essentially fostered the company’s image,” according to a 2011 article in The Times.
The story noted that his paintings and photographs hung “on every floor” of the Joffrey’s building in Chicago. It also noted the “austerity” of his life.
Mr. Migdoll did not marry and had no immediate survivors.
“He was about capturing the emotion attached to the movement itself,” Mr. Calmels, the dancer, said. “It was not about athleticism; it was about art.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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