Biography
Tytell graduated from Great Neck North Senior High school in 1962, and also attended Le Grand Verger in Lausanne, Switzerland. She briefly attended NYU and The New School . A job as stylist for the photographer Tosh Matsumoto was Tytell's first introduction to world of photography, and it was Matsumoto's own suggestion that prompted Tytell to start out on her own, and attend the Germain School of Photography.
Tytell's first job in photography came in 1972 when Ralph Lauren (at that time only a necktie designer) chose her to photograph his first collection. She has continued to work in fashion for clients such as, Givenchy, Christian Dior, and W Magazine in Paris.
Her editorial work has been published in over sixty countries during her tenure at Gamma-Liaison in New York, and Sipa Press in Paris. "National Geographic, Time, Life, People, Stern, Geo, Fortune, Playboy, Photo, and other magazines have printed her name next to stunning, evocative, and provocative portraits of the famous and the familiar, the downtrodden and the destitute."
Some of her extended documentary series consists of a major body of work on Haiti, made over several years on numerous trips, whose subjects include studies on opium in the Golden Triangle; the Rainbow family gathering in the piney woods of East Texas; life on the Ile Saint Louis in Paris; the bulls and wild horses of the Cammargue region in France; the psychic pilgrimage of a group of young Americans to sacred Inca sites in the Andes; and the Afro-Caribs in Suriname.
Her photographs have been exhibited extensively in Europe including the Villa de Medici in Rome, the Munich Stadtmuseum in Germany, Amerikahaus Berlin, Mannheim Kunstvairen, Gallerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris, as well as the I.C.P, and Neikrug Phtotographia in New York City.
Her work is collected by the International Center of Photography, in New York, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the MOMA, and various private collections.
In 1999, Mellon collaborated with her husband John Tytell, on the book Paradise Outlaws, a study of the Beat Generation and its lineage, in which Mellon contributed photographs, and John wrote the text. A photograph Mellon's, portraying Allen Ginsberg, was published in 2006 by Mark McMurray's Caliban Press in the book Ginsberg's Farm.
Read more about this topic: Mellon Tytell
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