By 2008, Mitchell’s finances had deteriorated to the point that he faced foreclosure on the home he had come to love so much. “I confess to you,” Mitchell says, “I was profoundly dumb about money.”
He became dependent on friends. A hundred bucks here, a couple hundred there. It got so bad that he hocked an expensive telephoto lens just to survive. Eventually, he and others concocted a complicated plan to save the house: A group of people, including a friend, would buy it at foreclosure, and he would eventually buy it back. As with many complicated plans, this one didn’t work out, though Mitchell is loath to go into the details. “My temptation to seek revenge has to be suppressed,” he says.
The house “meant everything to him,” says David Smith-Soto, a friend since childhood. “It was a huge blow losing it.”
Mitchell’s next-door neighbor let him live rent-free for a time in a basement apartment that he still calls home. But, he adds, “I can’t stand being there anymore. It has a really oppressive kind of effect on me.”
For all his troubles, connecting to his art also gave a kind of peace that had eluded him so often, a “vitality of the soul” he still feels today. And in the cave he discovered something powerful and fleeting: inspiration. He noticed that a small amount of light stabbed through a back door for a few hours a day. He photographed it, over and over, in a burst of creative energy. The images he created — wispy, swirling, mesmerizing — build on the body of work he’d begun with his Lumi-Gnosis series.
But then he put down his camera again. He’s not sure why.
He hasn’t taken a photograph since.
* * *
One day, in the depths of his financial quagmire, Mitchell happened upon a documentary about Christie’s auction house selling entertainment memorabilia. He scavenged through his belongings and pulled out the glassine sheets holding the images he shot back in 1964.
Both desperate and intrigued, he tracked down Russ Lease, a prominent collector who runs a Beatles replica clothing business in Columbia. “I was blown away,” Lease says one afternoon, recalling the day that Mitchell showed him the photographs.
The Millers were also intrigued. They set about developing a business plan. On a trip to New York, June Miller, who has an infectious, relentlessly positive manner, met with an attorney for Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon. She also shopped the idea of selling the photos to Christie’s.
What she was offering was remarkable. The Beatles are among history’s most photographed humans. But these were images — intimate, moody images bathed in sometimes hazy, sometimes glaring light — that had never been seen before. Here is the smoke curling off Ringo Starr’s cigarette as his thumb rests between his lips; here is a stage strewn with jelly beans, a police officer with bullets plugging his ears to block out the screaming girls. And, best of all, an image of the four Beatles shot from behind, the light captured just so that it describes the outlines of their heads, almost like the lightning Mitchell likes to “listen to” in the clouds.
On July 20, a Christie’s auctioneer at Rockefeller Plaza in New York opened the bidding on Sale 2633: “The Beatles Illuminated: The Discovered Works of Mike Mitchell.” The hammer came down on 46 sales, 46 black-and-white shots that had lived in obscurity in that white legal box marked “Beedles” since the second year of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.
Someone thought enough of Mitchell’s photo of the four Beatles shot from behind to pay $68,500 to have it. All in all, the collection garnered $361,937. Christie’s will get some, and the Millers will get some, but “a healthy chunk,” as June Miller puts it, will go to Mike Mitchell.
Enough to pay off some debts. Enough, maybe, to get out of the cave. Into the light.
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