Anniversary gallery: Jack Mitchell covers.

YOU NAME 'EM, HE'S SHOT 'EM. "Maria Tallchief is heaven to work with," Jack Mitchell says. "Wendy Whelan is wonderful in front of the camera," and "Merce has always been easy to work with. The shapes he makes are ready-made for photography."

Over the course of Dance Magazine's 80-year history, Mitchell has shot about one-sixth of all the covers--that's 168 to be exact. Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Cynthia Gregory, Carla Fracci, Gregory Hines, Mark Morris ... and the list goes on.

It was in 1950 that one of his photographs piqued Ted Shawn's interest. Shawn invited Mitchell to Jacob's Pillow that summer, where he took a photo of Jose Limon in Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias that wound up on DM's cover six years later. And so it began: "Dance was the portal to everything else for me," says Mitchell, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Time, and People.

A few memorable moments from his five-plus decades of dance photography:

In the early 1960s he shot Suzanne Farrell when she was still a student at the School of American Ballet. He asked her to borrow some costumes from the company and she showed up with Maria Tallchief's Swan Lake costume and Allegra Kent's Afternoon of a Faun costume. Mitchell says, "I told Walter Terry that story and he said, 'That girl knew where she was going from the get-go.'" A photo from this shoot wound up on the cover in 1965.

The photograph on the cover of the July 1983 issue at the time of George Balanchine's death was taken by Mitchell a few years earlier. "We were staying in the same hotel and we happened to come downstairs at the same time," he remembers. "I saw a green marble wall in the lobby, and said, 'God this is so beautiful, the light is so good, you're dressed so interestingly. Can we do some pictures?' It was a very good session."

Mitchell says of Jerome Robbins, "I photographed him in 1989. Jerry had a really good smile, and I was able to get it out of him once in a while." However during the shoot, Mitchell had to resort to trickery to capture the grin on camera. "I realized every time after the strobe light went off, he'd laugh. So I rigged another unit to make a different strobe light go off so he'd laugh, and then I'd take the picture."

Mitchell says he can't pinpoint a favorite: "I'm proud of all my covers," he says. "I loved every one as they came out."--Emily Macel

For Mitchell's memories of Ann Reinking, see p. 88. The award-winning documentary, Jack Mitchell: My Life Is Black and White by Craig Highberger will be released on DVD this spring. See www.jackmitchellmovie.com.