Jay Myself

Jay Maisel, an 88-year-old professional photographer whose life and artistic legacy has inspired many other shutterbugs to capture fleeting moments of revelatory composition, color, light, and human experience, is the subject of this jaunty, although ultimately melancholy, documentary. The director, Stephen Wilkes, was a wide-eyed assistant to Maisel back in 1979, absorbing daily lessons in photography from the master, and surviving Maisel’s blunt appraisal of Wilkes’s own pictures. Decades later, Jay Myself came together when word was out that Maisel had sold a 36,000 square foot building he purchased a half-century ago, a former bank in Manhattan’s SoHo district. Maisel bought the place with a down payment of $25,000. No longer able, due to his advanced age, to pay for upkeep on the place, Maisel has let it go for $55 million. The catch: he has five months to move out, a Herculean challenge given that every inch of the six-floor structure is full of stuff (from nails to bottles to hubcaps) that Maisel has kept. Wilkes tracks the extensive process of boxing and bagging up everything, but he also spends time with his former cantankerous mentor, whose next stage in life prompts reflections on the one currently wrapping up. Jay Myself is not just for photography enthusiasts: Maisel’s message is that seeing what is in front of us, really looking at the transient miracles that comprise a given moment, will bring “infinite joy.” Recommended. (T. Keogh)