I Found a Famous Photographer’s Early Print for Just $5 in an Antique Store

What started with a $5 photograph sitting on a shelf in a Florida antique store turned into a 76-year journey back through the early career of one of the 20th century’s most respected photographers.

Jack Mitchell (1925–2013) would eventually become nationally recognized for his extraordinary photographs of artists, dancers, actors, musicians, and other major cultural figures. But before that chapter of his career, Mitchell was a young photographer working in Florida. At only 15 years old, he has been documented as becoming the youngest professional photographer in the state. Long before his name became associated with some of the most recognizable figures in American arts and culture, he was taking photographs here in Central Florida.

That early part of Mitchell’s career is where my photograph comes into the story. I wasn’t looking for a Jack Mitchell photograph that day. I was simply doing what I often do: looking through old things in an antique store to see if something interesting caught my eye. Sitting on a shelf was an old black-and-white photograph showing an impressive water-skiing stunt. I picked it up, blew off the dust, and turned it over. On the back was a photographer’s stamp bearing a name I immediately recognized: Jack Mitchell.

I had actually written about Mitchell about a year earlier, so the name caught my attention immediately. The stamp identified his New Smyrna Beach, Florida studio. The photograph was priced at just $5. I knew enough about Mitchell to know that I wasn’t leaving it behind, although at the time I had no idea just how much history was attached to this particular photograph.

That began hours of painstaking research. While searching through old issues of the Daytona Beach News-Journal, I found the photograph I now physically owned reproduced in the newspaper’s archives. The issue was dated March 19, 1950. There it was—the same water-skiing scene, published for the public to see more than three-quarters of a century ago.

Seeing it was almost surreal. I could hold the original photograph in my hands while looking at that same image as it appeared on a newspaper page in 1950. Seventy-six years after the photograph appeared in print, I had reunited the surviving physical photograph with its contemporary published context.

The discovery also provided an interesting glimpse into a much earlier period of Mitchell’s career. Decades before the portraits for which he would become famous, he was a young photographer in Florida documenting the people and events around him. While I can’t reconstruct every step this particular print took in 1950, it is easy to imagine Mitchell photographing the water-skiing stunt, producing the print in his darkroom, stamping the back with his studio information, and the image eventually making its way to the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Then, somehow, the physical photograph survived. Years became decades. The young people in the photograph grew older, Mitchell’s career took him far beyond Florida, and the newspaper that published the image became part of an archive. Yet this photograph remained. At some point during those 76 years, it changed hands, lost its original context, and eventually ended up sitting on an antique-store shelf.

Finding the newspaper article provided another important piece of the puzzle because it correctly identified the people Mitchell photographed. One of them was William David Toothaker, pictured at the bottom right. Toothaker became a well-known figure in Florida’s mid-century water-skiing scene and went on to win the East Coast Water Skiing Championship in 1954.

My research eventually led me to William’s son, David Toothaker, who is now 75 years old and lives in Grand Isle, Florida. When I contacted David about the photograph, the story became even more interesting. He remembered his father mentioning Jack Mitchell.

“I remember he mentioned the name Jack Mitchell at various times,” David tells me. “The pics posted on Facebook could have been taken in Venetian Gardens, or possibly taken in either New Smyrna or Daytona on the river.”

David also remembered his father’s involvement in the local water-skiing scene.

“While living in Daytona prior to and after getting married to my mom he skied with a ski club on the river,” he said. David told me that he may even have additional photographs of his father from this period, although he isn’t sure who took them.

That correspondence brought a human element back into the photograph. The people in the picture were no longer simply unidentified young men and women frozen in a spectacular water-skiing scene. They had names, families, accomplishments and memories. Even more remarkably, more than seven decades later, the son of one of those people could still remember hearing the name of the photographer who captured the moment.

For me, rediscovering this photograph in the newspaper archives put the pieces of the puzzle back together. When I first picked it up in the antique store, all I really had was an old photograph and the name Jack Mitchell stamped on the back. Now I had its publication date, its newspaper context, the identities of the people pictured, and correspondence with the family of one of the subjects. Most importantly, I had connected a surviving physical photograph to a specific documented moment in Jack Mitchell’s early Florida career.

There is still one part of the story I may never know: where was this photograph all those years? How did a Jack Mitchell photograph from 1950 survive for more than seven decades before ending up in an antique store? Who originally kept it? How many times did it change hands? Was it stored in a drawer, an old photo album, or a box in someone’s attic? And how did a photograph once published in a Florida newspaper eventually wind up for sale for only $5?

Those unanswered questions are part of what makes finding old photographs so fascinating to me. Someone else could have walked right past it. Someone could have bought it simply because they liked the water-skiing scene. It could have disappeared into another box or collection for another 50 years. Instead, by pure chance, I recognized the name stamped on the back.

Who would have thought that a simple day of thrifting could help unravel a forgotten piece of Florida photography history? A photograph survived for more than three-quarters of a century, lost much of its original context, ended up for sale for $5, and was eventually reconnected with a story preserved in the pages of the very newspaper that published it in 1950.

For $5, I didn’t just bring home an old photograph. I brought home a surviving piece of Jack Mitchell’s early career—and 76 years later, I was fortunate enough to help give that photograph its story back.