Herbert Migdoll Joffrey Ballet photographs

1955-1989

Herbert Migdoll is a graphic designer and photographer. Much of his work has been photographing the Joffrey Ballet Company and collaborating with founders Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino on graphic design, costumes, and other visual aspects of the company.

Migdoll was born in 1944 in Jersey City, New Jersey, and moved to New York City to study architecture at Pratt Institute, then painting at Cooper Union college. Migdoll continued to study art, taking summer courses at New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and even was offered a Fulbright scholarship to study photography in Denmark. However, Migdoll declined and instead began involved photographing the bohemian scene of New York City. In 1965, he became a regular at Joffrey Ballet performances, using long exposure times to create time-lapse documentation of the dancers' movements. Migdoll shared his experimental photographs with Robert Joffrey, and he was officially asked to join as the Joffrey Ballet's staff photographer in 1968.

Migdoll not only documented Joffrey Ballet Company's performance repertoire, but he was also deeply involved in its graphic aesthetic in collaboration with the company's founders. He designed sets and graphic designs for programs, and his photomontage for the ballet Astarte was on the cover of Time.