Gjon Mili

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Gjon Mili (born 1904, Korça, Albania – 1984) was an Albanian-American photographer.

Born to Vasil Mili and his mother Viktori Cekani, came to the United States in 1923. Fifteen years later he was photographing for LIFE magazine (a relationship that continued until his death in 1984), and his assignments took him to the Riviera (Picasso); to Prades, France (Pablo Casals in exile); to Israel (Adolf Eichmann in captivity); to Florence, Athens, Dublin, Berlin, Venice, Rome, and Hollywood to photograph celebrities and artists, sports events, and concerts, and. sculptures and architecture.

Working with Harold Eugene Edgerton of MIT, Gjon Mili was a pioneer since the 1930s in the use of photoflash to capture a sequence of actions in one photograph. 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 1944, he directed the short film JAMMIN' THE BLUES, which was made at Warner Bros., and featured performances by Lester Young, Red Callendar, Harry Edison, "Big" Sid Catlett, Illinois Jacquet, Barney Kessel, Jo Jones and Marie Bryant. Mili did not serve as cinematographer for the film (that job was performed by Robert Burks) but the film used multiplied images that in many ways recall the multi-image still-frames done with the strobe. The imaginative use of the camera makes this film a minor landmark in the way musicians are filmed.

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. In the mid-1940s he was an assistant to the photographer Edward Weston. He died in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1984.

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.