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Remembering Herbert Migdoll
3 June 2025
Herbert Migdoll, the official photographer and designer of the Joffrey Ballet for about a half-century, passed away in April at the age of 90.
He was born in New Jersey and attended the Pratt Institute before transferring to Cooper Union where he graduated in 1957. He was granted a Fulbright scholarship in 1968 for photography research in Denmark.
He met Robert Joffrey, one of the Ballet's founders, during a random encounter in the 1960s at a pharmacy in New York City. The two men bonded over the Greenwich Village arts scene in which they were both involved.
Migdoll joined the Joffrey Ballet in 1968 and later moved with it to Los Angeles, where it was based for a decade, before the Joffrey moved to Chicago in 1995.
After Joffrey's death in 1988 and that of company co-founder Gerald Arpino in 2008, Migdoll was one of the few remaining links to the dance company's beginnings.
He was part of the Joffrey's DNA. He retired in 2016.
He also served as the art director of Dance Magazine, where he was responsible for dozens of covers from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Before joining the Joffrey, he had been experimenting with time-lapse photography. He found that approach particularly well suited to capturing dance.
"All I wanted to do was time-lapse, which meant leaving the shutter open, and letting the dancer move through space, and whatever got caught was it," he said.
His composite image depicting the Joffrey ballet Astarte -- which blended rock music, film and eros -- made the cover of Time magazine.
His interest in capturing motion fed his other career as a painter.
"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.
"He was about capturing the emotion attached to the movement itself. It was not about athleticism; it was about art."
His paintings and photographs hung on every floor of the Joffrey's building in Chicago.