Jammin' the Blues

Trained as an engineer and self-taught in photography, Gjon Mili was the first to use electronic flash and stroboscopic light to create photographs that had more than scientific interest. Since the late 1930s, his pictures of dance, athletics, and musical and theatrical performances have astonished and delighted millions of viewers, revealing the beautiful intricacy and graceful flow of movement too rapid or too complex for the eye to discern. His portraits of artists, musicians, and other notables are less visually spectacular, but equally masterful.

In 1939, Mili became a freelance photographer working for LIFE. In the course of more than four decades, literally thousands of his pictures were published by LIFE as well as other publications.

Gjon Mili is the one photographer who has formed our contemporary visual understanding of movement, both in the direct example of his pictures and in the influence his work has had on all action photographers who have come after him.

His book Photographs and Recollections is a summary of his fifty years of work in photography. —VP