When things are good, when sadness gives way to peace, life rhymes for Mike Mitchell. That’s the way he puts it.
It rhymes. He hears it, though you may not. A private poetry reading for one.
Of all the things that rhyme for Mike Mitchell, nothing rhymes like light. There it is, off in the clouds. A burst, describing momentary squiggles of brilliance in the sky. He sees it and he listens to it, though it makes not a sound. Lightning in the thunderhead. One silent burst, and it’s gone.
A camera flashes in the distance, across the shipping channel from the spot by the willow tree where he always unfolds his camp chair, the spot on Hains Point that he calls his “satellite office.”
Another lightning burst.
“It’s rhyming, man,” Mitchell tells me. “I can’t explain it, you know. Light, light, light. Three enunciations of light.”
So this is a story about a man who loves light. About a man who thrived in it — professionally and financially — but somehow, thuddingly, found himself penniless and living in a basement, a light-deprived urban cave.
And it’s a story about how resurrected light — the kind captured on rolls of film a long, long time ago — unexpectedly, even if for just these few moments, has turned Mike Mitchell into a photographer of international renown. It’s about how light can liberate a cave dweller from the darkness.
* * *
The music on the radio in his 1955 Chevy jolted Mike Mitchell. Jangly guitar. Rolling bass. Lopsided drum beat.
“Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something / I think you’ll understand / When I say that something / I wanna hold your hand.”
It was 1964, and Mitchell, an 18-year-old boy from Oxon Hill who preferred taking pictures to schoolwork, had never heard anything like it. It felt like a “clarion call” to his generation, he says. Not the sappy words, but the rhythms that this new band, the Beatles, was producing. It made him feel like something big was happening in the world. Something was changing.
Mitchell, who by then was already working professionally as a freelance photographer, talked the editors at Washington, a small now-defunct magazine, into getting him a press pass for the Beatles concert a few days later at the Washington Coliseum. It was the British group’s first in the United States. Mitchell did not have a flash for his 35mm Nikon camera, so he let the available light — the stage lights, the auditorium lights — guide him.
Mitchell developed those photographs in the bathroom at the home in Oxon Hill where he lived with his mother. He doesn’t remember if he got paid for the few images that were published from that concert. But he remembers how they were displayed — the magazine produced a mocking spread, deriding the Beatles as a fad.
“It was a parody. It was a spoof,” he recalls. “It was really embarrassing to me. I was mortified.” They had turned his clarion call into a sour note.
Mitchell eventually took the 16 or 17 rolls of film he shot that night and cut the negatives into strips of six, placing them in glassine sleeves.
The sleeves went into a white legal storage box, “heaped,” as he puts it, with hundreds of other images. They would stay in that box, mostly untouched and unconsidered, for nearly half a century.
_1329862681.jpg)
Loading...
Comments