Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Remembering Jay Maisel
24 August 2026
Jay Maisel has died at the age of 95.
Born in Brooklyn, he attended Abraham Lincoln High School before studying painting and graphic design at Manhattan's Cooper Union and Yale University.
He started his commercial photography career in 1954.
For nearly half a century, Maisel and his family lived in the six-story Germania Bank Building on the Bowery in lower Manhattan. He bought the building in 1966 for $102,000, when the neighborhood was in decline, as both a single-family residence and his studio. The 2019 film, Jay Myself followed Maisel during his last days in the building among mountains of mounted slides.
As a commercial photographer, Maisel's accomplishments included five Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers, the first two covers of New York Magazine, the cover of the best-selling jazz album of all time Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, 12 years of advertising with United Technologies and awards from the International Center for Photography, American Society of Media Photographers, Art Directors Club, Professional Photographers of America and The Cooper Union.
But it was everyday life that caught his eye. When he stopped taking on commercial work in the late 1990s, he continued to focus on that personal work. He couldn't take his eyes off it.
Jaywalking in NYC presents a few of those intimate images. Introducing them, he wrote:
Images have been taken from satellites. One can shoot from jet planes, helicopters, and trains, buses, cars, and get great stuff. But you have to get down on the ground and start walking to get the intimate relationships that occur between the people in your images and you.
Even then, he pointed out, you'll miss shots. But the consolation is that you saw them in the first place. That, after all, is what it's all about, he adds.
We featured a Santa Fe workshop interview with Maisel in a 2016 Saturday Matinee and mentioned him in one or another context a couple of dozen times in 15 stories we published over the years.