I was sad to hear of Jay’s death on August 20, 2026. We met and became friends in the late 1970’s. He was a great friend and inspiration. Here is the story.

After graduating from Union College in Schenectady NY in 1974 I moved to Aspen Colorado, never having been there before. While in Aspen I was hanging out in a bar and met a young woman who was in town for a photography workshop taught by Jay Maisel. “Who is Jay Maisel?” I wondered. She showed me his work and introduced us. We really hit it off. It turns out he knew Arnold Bittleman – my college art professor – when Jay and Arnie were students at Yale studying with Josef Albers. When Jay learned I was making color photograms it sealed our friendship. He always wanted to make color photograms and never got around to it. He encouraged me to keep at it and keep in touch. Damn right I did. His imagination, creativity, kindness and generosity seemed endless.

The next time I encountered Jay was after I had moved to NYC in 1985 to be a professional photographer.  I was assisting various photographers and was enjoying the camaraderie of a pro photo group on Compuserve run by photographers Gary Gladstone and Jack Reznicki. It was an early internet group and I met many great people from all over the US. I was on the phone with Jack one day when he invited me to come to a photo salon that evening.

Jay was there and he was one of the presenters. It was hosted by Chip Forelli in his studio on west 42nd St. It was a transformative evening. I got to meet lots of photographers IRL which was much better than Compuserve. At the end of the evening Jay and I walked out together talking and bullshitting and joking. I watched as Jay stopped looked carefully and then took photos of scenes that I never would have noticed.  Since I lived on the west end of Spring St. in SoHo and Jay at the east end we took the train downtown together. Our friendship and his mentorship was rekindled.

I became a regular at the monthly salons, and eventually became responsible for inviting presenters. The salon was created by Howard Schatz and Jay and Barbara Bordnick and Chip Forelli and Jack Reznicki. We would invite 3 photographers to show work and encourage discussion of their work but discourage technical questions. (We joked: “please don’t talk about your favorite f-stop!) It moved from studio to studio until we found a regular home in a luxe studio in the Starrett-Lehigh Building on west 26th street.

Jay presented work nearly every month. He viewed it as an opportunity to review and edit his work and showing the results of that critical step was important to him. His work was prodigious and always excellent.

I loved visiting “The Bank” – Jay’s magnificent home/office/studio on Spring Street. There was always something interesting going on. We both loved prowling the shops on nearby Canal Street where you could pick up all sorts of wonderful tools or props or quirky surplus stuff. He had all the rooms on one floor organized by the stuff from Canal St. He had a woodworking shop, and on the top floor was his home where he lived with his wife Linda and their daughter Amanda and their dogs. The air conditioning was provided by a huge through-the-window a/c unit and fed into giant tubes of polyethylene normally used in greenhouses., It branched off into each room through the transom windows above the doors. The second floor bankers’ offices were dedicated to galleries of prints. The lights were controlled by motion sensor switches and would magically turn on as you walked down the hallways and into rooms.  Everything was stored in filing cabinets – there must have been hundreds of them. There was a wonderful old elevator. It was a magical place. You can get a great feel for “The Bank” in Stephen Wilkes’ film “Jay Myself” (it is well worth the $3 or $4 to rent) available on many platforms – Prime, YouTube, Apple, etc – that documents Jay’s move from the bank to Brooklyn after a developer made an offer for the building that no sane person would refuse. Plus Jay was a pretty smart guy when it came to dollars and cents.

But I think that Jay’s greatest legacy is something else. He was a dedicated and generous educator. He graciously shared his knowledge and techniques and influenced and inspired thousands and thousands of photographers. He could seem like a curmudgeon, but it was part of his “schtick” perhaps to protect his kindness and heart of gold and wonderful sense of humor. Jay was not only a hugely talented artist – he was a larger-than-life mentor to our photography community.

He kindly loaned me a couple of his special cameras for my Momento project.

Jay wrote:

When I first saw some images in a photo magazine taken with a Hologon I was blown away by he crispness and lack of distortion. Little did I know that you really had to “steady eddy”, plus to shoot this camera – for the first few weeks the objects in the half the pictures were my fingers. The other half didn’t exist as I usually left the lens cap on because I was used to shooting with a single lens reflex and I would work thru the viewfinder and say, “I see it, I can shoot it.” Finally, with a little wire I attached a small sign that stuck up in the viewfinder window that said, “shmuck” to remind me to take the lens cap off. I should have known there would be problems because when it was delivered to me I took one look and called royaltone, my old camera store – I screamed at the salesman, Al Geller, “you idiots forgot to put the lens in the camera.” He calmly answered, “look, asshole, take off the lens cap.” I did and saw the lens that was deep in the camera body and said to Al, “Never mind.” I love this camera, it’s one of the sharpest lenses I’ve ever seen, it vignettes, but if you put on a filter to compensate for the vignette it makes the already slow f8 into a mind numbing f16. So I learned to love the vignettes.

The lens cap threading is so fine that after a few weeks it’s useless so I put a bunch of special Velcro type stuff on the camera and on the lens cap to attach it.

Marty Forscher made this one of a kind camera by sticking the Hologon into a motorized Nikon As you can see by the photo the battery pack is by Jacobson and was a precursor of the motors made by Nikon. It’s the one camera I really would love to use for digital but can’t.

– Jay Maisel

Jay wrote:

iPan – CRAZY CAMERA

This is a camera designed and made by hand by Michael Lawton who is a certified genius, with cameras and photography. I met Michael in Romania while we were both at Bucharest for the U.S. government. I was awed by a 360-degree camera he’d made and asked him what other toys he had. He told me he had figured out how to cut a Nikkormat in half, stretch it, put it in a long pressure plate, and a 4×5 lens and end up with a panoramic camera with a 2 to 9 proportion. He made three of them for me, a wide angle on one, and a normal on the second and a telephoto on the third.

I adore this camera and wish I could use it digitally. It’s just a joy to use. The results made me feel like a kid with a new toy each time I used it – unfortunately since I’m shooting digital since 2000, I’ve not used it for seven or eight years, but like everything else in my life it’s on my list.

-Jay Maisel

I will miss him and I will always remember the great Jay Maisel. He enriched my life and am eternally grateful.

The nature prints in my Herbarium series are incredibly simple.  You coat a sheet of watercolor paper – I use Fabriano Artistico – with a salt solution and let it dry. Then when it is time to make the print you paint silver nitrate on your specimen – mine are leaves – with a foam brush.  Place the subject on the salted paper – silver coated side down, put a salted cover sheet over it, and use a print maker’s brayer to press the two sheets together with the subject between them.

Then flip the “sandwich” over – lift the bottom (now on top) sheet off, place both sheets face up being careful not to move the subject off of the bottom (formerly top) sheet.

Carefully place the sheets in the UV light box and expose. Do not look at the UV light any more than absolutely necessary.  When the prints seem dark enough – they will seem too dark – which is something learned by experience and practice. My exposures are usually 5 to 10 minutes.

Then rinse the prints in copious amounts of water for about 5 minutes. Insufficient first rinse will cause staining of the highlights. Then fix in sodium thiosulphate, and then wash thoroughly. Squeegee the prints and place them face up on a drying screen.  When dry flatten them in a hot dry mount press.

People often ask me how I know when a project is done. The straight answer is I don’t know how I know. It varies. Sometimes the project ends on its own, when a technology no longer exists or the materials are no longer available. Other times I am distracted into doing a new project and the old one can’t compete for my attention. And occasionally I just can’t bear to make another piece in the series. Or I feel as though I have explored it as deeply as I can – there are no more avenues to explore, no more questions to ask and nothing left to keep me engaged.

The good thing is that there always seem to be new ideas, projects and challenges. Sometimes there are fallow periods when I take a break, like when someone has writer’s block. Those periods always seem to end on their own too. They are awkward but healthy because they allow new ideas to come to me naturally. I do keep absorbing the ideas that surround me continuously and somehow that will break the pause and inspire new work. I can’t force it since it is intuitive and I just know when I have been captured by a new idea that leads to a new project.

My father was a quiet yet wise man. He said “Never look back, keep moving ahead.” And to that I always say “Yes!” because it is always more fun.

One of the earliest forms of image making was “nature printing.”  Many different processes fall into the category of nature printing. It uses the object to make an image, sometimes with ink, but in my case using silver nitrate and the salted-paper-print process of the 19th century.  Some years ago I started on this experimental process, using leaves that I paint with silver nitrate and the press between sheets of salted paper. The leaves are removed and the paper is exposed to UV light until the image appears. It is washed and fixed and washed again. Each print is unique.  I call this series “Herbarium” I have lots more work to do to complete this project.

My drive to create was seriously challenged in 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic engulfed the earth. I was staying in a house in Colorado that had a limited supply of water and a fragile septic system. It was impossible to use darkroom chemistry there. So I began a series of Lumen Prints there which I call “What Remains.” A lumen print is made by placing objects on unexposed photographic paper, putting it in full sun and allowing an image to form. It usually takes hours in direct sunlight.

I picked beautiful but invasive Thistle plants and put them on expired photographic paper in the bright sunlight. After hours of exposure an image appears.  After they dry I store them in light proof envelopes until I can get back to a darkroom with water and sewer for processing. I scan them before and after processing. Then I combine the scans and manipulate them in Photoshop to produce my “What Remains” series of archival inkjet prints.  I also created prints on Cape Cod using seaweed scavenged from the beach.

The photograms of What Remains are flora and fauna that might survive the Anthropocene Era.

A selection of the What Remains images are on my website.

Who will find my Anthropocene fictional fossils? These fragments of evidence from the Anthropocene Era? What kind of imaginary being will discover my fake fossils? What tools will they use? I decided to start a new series “Sapiens” to answer these questions.  So I photographed real fossil beds at the Dinosaur National Monument in Morrison Colorado near Denver. I used those as backgrounds for still life photographs of the tools a fossil hunter uses. The Sapiens images are ambrotypes – collodion wet-plate images on black glass. We may not know what the next inhabitants of earth will look like but I can imagine the old fashioned tools they might use to unearth my Anthropocene future fossils.

It is pretty clear that something is going on. The Earth is warming and our flora and fauna are forced to adapt or die. Scientists have warned us that the climate is changing and the effects are dire. Those warnings are being realized even faster than predicted. My Anthropocene series looks even farther out into the future. What if 50,000 or 100,000 years from now life as we know it has been extinguished by climate change? Will there be any evidence of what was lost? The Anthropocene series of fictional fossils are the evidence that future beings might discover.  They show plant and animal fossil traces of what humans destroyed in the current Anthropocene era. They might have existed in the imaginary Borderlands landscapes.

In the Anthropocene project I make photograms of insects, plants, bones and shells on stone. Aspects of the project were on my mind for years. I live in a house with a slate roof and inevitably a slate or two will fall off the roof. I collected them thinking that the dark stone would make a great substrate for a wet-plate collodion picture. But I couldn’t imagine what the right subject would be. I procrastinated using them because I thought I had a great process but no idea of the right subject. Then I happened to see an exhibit of fossils and knew what I had to do. As the seasons change the subject matter evolves, spring brings ferns just like the earliest photograms. Fall brings leaves, summer I collect seashells. Everything is at risk from climate change, especially insects which I purchase from specialty websites.

With the advice of the Exhibition Lab critiques I jumped into the project making fossils from the future for my Anthropocene series. Each “fossil” is a unique one-of-a-kind sculpture. I learned how to weld steel stands for them and made bases out of rocks from my yard.  The sculptures are titled, signed and dated on the back in black ink on a white painted area just like the catalog numbers that paleontologists mark real fossils with.

A selection of the Anthropocene project is on my website.

I was fortunate to participate in Michael Foley’s Exhibition Lab project in 2019. I wanted help making my Borderlands series better and some help getting started on a new series I had been thinking about for years but never could get started making work. Michael is a gallerist and educator who runs a gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His Exhibition Lab program gets 6 or 7 photographers together for a series of critique sessions. We met once a month and analyzed each other’s work and heard Michael’s thoughts.  Then we would return to our studios, work on the images and bring new versions to critique the next month. We were fortunate to have critique sessions with guests Matthew Pillsbury, Elinor Carucci and Philip Toledano.

It was a great experience. I got great advice on the Borderlands prints and feel like they are finally as I want them. And the new Anthropocene project is well underway after getting great feedback and ideas from the group and the guests. Elinor Carucci pointed out that the Anthropocene project work relates well to the Borderlands imaginary landscapes.  Her insight was the inspiration to get back to work on the two projects.

In the summer of 2019 the project culminated in an exhibition at the Foley Gallery.

Since I began using the wet-plate collodion process in 2001 I have shot hundreds of plates. Nearly every one has been scanned. The hand made wet-plate process creates tell-tale artifacts. Every plate has a thumbprint on one corner from when I pour on the collodion. I decided to use those artifacts as a source for a series of unconventional self-portraits. They were my fingerprints after all. So I began reviewing the scans of the plates and chose a few with good corners. I enlarged them and printed them digitally to get a feel for how my idea would look. It quickly became clear that the corner thumbprints weren’t interesting. Another idea that didn’t work. As Thomas Edison once said “It isn’t a failure – it is a discovery of one more thing that didn’t work.”

But in the process of reviewing the scans I realized the edges of the plates looked like landscapes.  I started examining my glass plate scans, choosing ones which would make panoramic landscapes. Those 4 or 5 inch wide artifacts were rich with detail. My earlier plates were better for this. As I gained experience with the collodion wet-plate process I was able to make cleaner plates with fewer artifacts. But I still had plenty to choose from.

I worked on the scans in Photoshop to enhance gradients and add subtle color and tonality. I appropriated my own work to create worlds that never existed but looked familiar. I made big prints and found venues to exhibit them. I showed them at portfolio reviews and got some great feedback and advice on how to improve the images. The series is called Borderlands and the panoramic prints are about 8 feet wide.

A selection of the Portragonia series is on my website.