“Edges of Ailey” edited by Adrienne Edwards

Whitney Museum of American Art, September 2024, 388 pp.

If you’ve seen any photographs of the choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931–89), it is quite likely that one of them was by Jack Mitchell, whose archive of Ailey photography (now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture) includes over 10,000 black-and-white negatives and 1,300 color slides and transparencies. Within this archive is a subarchive of double portraits showing Ailey and his cherished leading dancer, Judith Jamison, taken in the 1970s. They are positioned very close together . . .