He is the touchstone against which many of the most accomplished photographers in the world measure their color photography. He has been a brilliant, outspoken, pioneering photographer for more than 50 years, as well as one of the most sought-after lecturers and workshop instructors. For all those years he has captured his images with Nikons, from the original F he used in 1959 to take the photo of Miles Davis that appears on the cover of what is generally regarded as the finest jazz album ever recorded, Kind of Blue, to the D3 he carries today.

Nikon is proud to celebrate our continuing partnership with Jay Maisel.

Jay Maisel will tell you that there's not really much he can tell you about his photographs. He prefaced his recording of the audio section of our accompanying slideshow by saying, "There's not much to say...I saw what I saw and I took the pictures."

The key phrase is "what I saw."

The best way for you to appreciate what Jay sees is to first look at his photos, then listen in as he verbally sketches the world according to Jay.

And for that, we'll get out of the way.

Balance
"When I was a young photographer, an art director looked at my work and said, 'You walk too fast. You're all over the place, you're not waiting for things to happen.' I still walk too fast, but it was good for me to know what he meant—which was that I had to take the time to work a subject...and I had to have the patience to allow things to happen.

"When I'm shooting something for five minutes or an hour or however long I may take, and I get to the point where I feel that I finally have it, then that's the time for me to really dig in and work on it some more.

"The downside of doing all that shooting is that there is a line between spontaneity and reality. If I see something wonderful and take one shot of it, then I have spontaneity. But when I take a lot of shots to explore it fully and make sure that I've got it, at some point I've lost the spontaneity. That's reality."

A Different Approach
"Not knowing what you're going to shoot is the great adventure. If you go out knowing what you're going to shoot, the great adventure is gone. Most people work to have a plan; I've worked to not have a plan for shooting when I go out.

"I think when I was younger I was pretty much focused on what I wanted to do. As I got older I realized that sometimes the thing along the way is much better than the thing you set out to do; and part of the reason I figured that out was, I always took pictures for myself, and I would go out shooting on jobs and I would see that the things around the job, away from the job, were sometimes much more interesting and maybe even more applicable to the job than the things they sent me to shoot. So I just tried to keep as open as I could. And for me that became a mantra: keep as open as you can. If you are too focused on what you want to do, you're going to miss everything else along the way."

"I'd have a client and he'd say, 'I want a Jay Maisel picture.' Okay, that's carte blanche, right? So I do it, and he'd say, 'That's not exactly what I had in mind." Because what they want you to do is repeat yourself.

Applicable to the Job
"Here's the deal: in photography, in order to take a great picture, you've got to be a great photographer, or you've got to get very lucky. In commercial photography, which I really haven't done in 15 years, you have to have a great client. It doesn't matter if you're a great photographer; if you don't have a great client they're going to use the worst pictures they can find, or they're going to ask for the worst pictures they can find, and if you change their concept, they'll go up a wall because they had a concept. The fact that you come up with something better doesn't matter.

"I can tell you exactly the day I said I'm getting out of [the commercial] business. It was the day somebody said to me, 'I don't want it better, I want the layout.' We called it "Black Book" art direction—they would take a picture out of the Black Book and tell you to do it.

"I was reading something that Woody Allen had written about Charlie Chaplin. He said that Chaplin had the ability to disappoint his audience, to go further than they were willing to go. You can translate this to photography. There are some kinds of people who find something they do, they do it well, they have an audience for it, they're beloved for it, and that's their lives. And there are other people who want to get better, and they do this at the risk of losing their audience."

The Great Client
"Gordon Bowman at United Technologies—he'd send me out to do something and if it didn't work out, I'd call and say, 'This is not going to work.' He'd say, 'Okay, figure something else out and get back to us.' It wasn't, 'I sent you to do that and you have to do it.'

"For instance, they sent me out to photograph cars being spray painted because they made the finish for the cars. I got to the factory and that day they were doing champagne color, and puce, and beige, and it was an explosive atmosphere and I couldn't set up any lights, and my cameras were getting full of paint. So I called up and said, 'This is impossible.' They said, 'Go ahead, figure out something else.' So I thought, what they're really talking about is the ability of the car to look good and last over time, so I did a bunch of pictures of a red car that had a beautiful finish. Then I wet the car down and shot it with a reflection, so it's talking about the ability of the car to withstand moisture and heat. But they didn't use that; they didn't like it. But they did use something else I did on that red car. So my feeling is, if you do exactly what the client is telling you, you're a plumber. You'll make a lot of money, but there's no creativity.

"Another time they sent me out to photograph for a wind farm they were going to build. They sent me to Point Lobos to get [images of] nature that had been formed by the wind, things at an angle and stuff like that, and I did it, and as I was going home I looked up in the sky in San Francisco and there were hang gliders, and I thought, that's what they really want. They really don't want what nature does with wind, they want what man does with wind. So I got the hang gliders and they thought that was a great idea.

"And that's a great client."

The Big Switch
"I didn't want to have anything to do with digital. I was used to film. I don't like to change anything. I hate learning new equipment. My transformation to digital was due to, one, I didn't like what happened to Kodachrome—it changed; Kodak said they had to respond to the EPA. Two, I didn't like any of the replacements for it. And three, Sam Garcia [Nikon professional markets tech rep] said, as he forced a D1 camera into my hands, 'You're going to like this. Trust me.'

"From that day 'til now I shot three rolls of film. So my change has been complete. I'm delighted in every way shooting digital, and at the same time I hate the entire thing because I don't have a finished product after I shoot it, in the sense of a slide or a print." 

Techniques
"I check the back of the camera, but not while I'm shooting. Here's the thing: I don't care who you talk to, any photographer, if he's honest, no matter how long he's been in the business, no matter how good he is technically, he's worried only about one thing: exposure. We know what we're doing, what we want, but we don't know if we can get it. And digital makes it a lot easier. You look at the back and you say, 'I'm not screwing up.' I see what I'm getting. So in one way you don't shoot more, but in another way you do because you can move on from here and do better.

"But I bracket all the time anyway, so everyone tells me I'm crazy, but then I'm quite eccentric in the way I approach everything. I'm bracketing to see the different looks...I want to see what it looks like a little lighter or darker. Somebody says you can do that in the computer, but that's ten seconds longer at the computer than I want to spend.

"Manipulating images? I have no idea how to do any of that. The people who work for me, I tell them, 'I don't want you to manipulate for me.'

"If I crop a picture of any kind in any way, I suffer the agonies of the damned. The cropping and manipulation of my pictures is totally minuscule. It's the way I look at the game. I'm looking at the game to capture it the way it is.

"A strange thing has happened, though, with the D3 and new sensors and all that quality: I sometimes think that I'm going to do a whole series called Croppings, because I can now crop and not lose any quality at all, and the changes I like. But I haven't done it yet. When you see a series called Croppings, you'll know."

Teaching
"The key point of my teaching: you're going to be challenged.

"For the workshops at the bank building [his home and office], I don't go out on the street with [the students]. You don't teach people anything; you just let them discover it for themselves. You show them some doors. If they walk through those doors, it's their trip, not yours.

"I don't think a lot of people are aware of their capacities and how good they are. The things that hold them back are sometimes very simple.

"I do a lot of extensive asking them what they liked and didn't like about the class, and the thing they say was very important to them was the thing they'd never do if they weren't asked to do it—and that's criticize their own work. I tell them, 'I can criticize your work, but next week I'm not around,' so the mantra I give them is: be your own severest critic and your own worst enemy. It's a big fight because people are inherently resistant to criticizing their own work, so I get them to criticize each other's work as long as you can do it in a spirit of learning. I think they learn from each other as much as they learn from me."

Tools
"One of the points I try to make [to the students] is: you know about photography, but how about ivory scrimshaw and Persian miniatures and Japanese graphics and Korean vases? You're never going to know all that, but you have a history, a visual heritage, and to not take advantage of it is insane. To think you would just study photography is short sighted.

"People ask about what photography schools they should go to. I say, 'None. The education you can get looking at pictures in museums is what would help you very much in your work.'

"People ask, 'What would you recommend I do to be a better photographer?' Well, first of all, move your ass. Second, look at what's been done with markings on a page for 30,000 years, and then you'll have freedom.

"Think about it: except for maybe Lartigue, has there ever been a prodigy in photography? I can't think of any. It's part of your life experience. It's not like math or music—that's inside your head. What we're talking about deals with the external world."

Perception
"I tell people, 'You do not always see what you think you see.' There's optical illusion and the references things make to other things. I talk about the fact that color does not exist except in relation to other colors, that as soon as it changes size or is acted on by the environment, it's a different color and you have to be aware of that. Turn an incandescent light on, a fluorescent, and the paint swatch you brought home from the paint store changes. Put it next to a dark sofa or put a black painting next to it and it changes."

Luck
"That's part of the class, too. I try to explain to them, you're going to screw up so many times in your life that when something goes your way, jump on it, take it. You're entitled. It's a gift. And learn from it.

"Don't be limiting yourself to what you intended because part of you is going to see [other] things. Let your intuition take you. And don't be afraid to fail. Nobody's going to die; it ain't brain surgery. And the fear of failure is paralyzing. When Jasper Johns died, something in his obituary just grabbed me. He'd said he always thought of failure as a means of progress.

"Edison had 1,800 experiments that failed, and he said, 'I know 1,800 things that don't work; now I can move on."

There's information about Jay's NYC workshop at www.jaymaisel.com. Jay talks about the photos you see here in the media center at right.