If you haven’t yet made it to the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s essential summer exhibitions, such as Sri Prabha’s “Resonator – Reanimator”, which we reviewed last week, you have plenty of time—they close on Oct. 22. Just don’t neglect the small upstairs exhibition “Benn Mitchell Photographs: NYC to Hollywood,” a gallery of works by this wunderkind photographer.
Mitchell, a native New Yorker who died in 2021 here in Boca Raton, received his first camera at 13, sold his first photograph to Life magazine in 16, and managed to talk his way onto the Warner Brothers lot at 17. “NYC to Hollywood” highlights Mitchell’s formative creative years in both major metropolises.
A true egalitarian, Mitchell exhibited a boundless curiosity for people and places, as his Warners photos reveal. He captured plenty of stars both camera-ready and in repose, from his iconic image of Humphrey Bogart squinting while taking a drag off a cigarette to Carmen Miranda in full fruity regalia. (There’s even a shot, later on, of Marilyn Monroe riding an elephant in Madison Square Garden, an image that is not perfectly in focus but indelible nonetheless, as it proves this surreal event actually happened.)
But his backstage access is perhaps most notable for its inclusion of everyone involved in the picture-making apparatus. Sharing equal weight with the A-list actors are sound technicians, projectionists, chorus girls, camera operators and extras. Women, too, play an outsized role in Mitchell’s photos, despite what was then (and probably still is) a male-dominated business: We see a dance instructor smoking a cigarette like it’s the sexiest act on Earth (it kind of was back then) and a wardrobe technician darning socks.
In Mitchell’s world, the Bogarts were just one of countless cogs in the machine of production. In revealing the artifice behind the airbrushed images that finally made it onto Silver Screens, his photographs effectively show us the Hollywood dream factory in between reveries.
The remainder of the Museum’s absorbing exhibition explores Mitchell’s time in postwar New York City. Clearly, he had a predilection toward eccentric signage, from the marquees of movie theaters with their screaming, lurid titles (“This Woman is Dangerous”) to the businesses hawking haircuts, laundry services and shoe repair. We see novelties like 3D movie theaters and a billboard for a “leopard girl” on—where else?—Coney Island. In a city ablaze in advertising and nightlife, it’s easy to lose yourself, even after all these decades, in the teeming muchness of it all—reveling, by osmosis, in New York at its New Yorkiest.
While Mitchell did not neglect the more, let’s say, obvious New York City pillars, he photographed them in revealing ways, from the lion sculpture outside the New York Public Library, looking regal in a snowy winter, to the Empire State Building, presented in a high-angle shot as a noirish, imposing shadow. Indeed, Mitchell had a great eye for the architecture of composition, and for the composition of architecture, as present in images such as “Elevated Train After 1947 Snowstorm,” with its compelling geometric framing, and “The Dalton Gang,” in which a figure smokes a cigarette in silhouette in the bottom left, under the concentric patterns of light from a theater’s porte cochère.
This is consistent with Mitchell’s approach to photographing people, or lack thereof, in the big city. Unlike his California photos, most of Mitchell’s New Yorkers are viewed from behind, or backlit, or in the background: as anonymous coats and hats and shoes drifting among his central subjects, the electric boulevards and buildings.
Occasionally, though, humanity breaks through in a transcendent way. In “Chinese Laundry,” a gaggle of kids plays with toy guns outside the storefront of the titular business, as if performing in a youth recital of “West Side Story.” But our eyes are drawn to the Chinese boy gazing out from inside the Laundromat, and we can ascribe all sorts of emotions to the blank slate of his visage: poignant, forlorn, excluded. Or he could just be, like Mitchell himself, a curious observer, taking in another scene of everyday life in the greatest city in the world.
“Benn Mitchell Photographs: Hollywood to NYC” runs through Oct. 22 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. Museum admission is $16 adults and $12 seniors. Call 561/392-2500 or visit bocamuseum.org.
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