NAPA VALLEY, Calif. — A cornucopia of professional and amateur photographers reside in our community, among them Napa-based Mitchell Glotzer, whose specialty is capturing musical icons in performance. You may have glimpsed him clicking away at the beginning of concerts throughout the valley. For the past 15 years, he has been the man with a Canon camera. Standing 10 to 20 feet from the front of the stage, he snaps between 250 to 400 images that he then edits the following morning.
Glotzer has been the house photographer for the Uptown Theatre since its renovation into a concert venue in 2010, as well as for Blue Note Napa since 2016. In addition, he has photographed musical guests at the BottleRock festival since its inception in 2013, plus he has documented musicians and vocalists who have appeared at the Oxbow Commons, the Meritage Resort and Silverado Country Club concerts.
Now 20 of his favorite archival photos — chosen from his tens of thousands of images — will be on display at Napa County Library’s “Art in the Library” program during the months of May and June. On Friday, May 10, from 6:15 to 7:30 p.m., a free meet-the-artist talk and reception will take place in the library’s Community Room.
Glotzer was born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey. At Boston University, he majored in finance and attended law school at the New England School of Law to, in his words, “Change the world.”
For a decade he practiced law in Boston, taking on a variety of legal jobs with Greenpeace, Greater Boston Legal Services, and title and escrow work. When he and his wife, Dorian Kirk, moved to Napa in 1994, it was not so that Glotzer could continue his legal career but rather to open a bagel shop.
“We had a Boston friend who had moved to St. Helena with her family, and we would come out to visit,” he said. “It turned out that her dad was a bagel-lover, and we would get together and talk about bagels. While in high school, my first job was working in a bagel shop. I loved baking bagels and always wanted to have my own shop.”
Kirk and Glotzer’s New York Bagels opened in what is now Jamba Juice at Silverado Plaza a year after their relocation to Napa.
“We closed after five years,” Glotzer said. “It was seven days a week, so much work, but it was a great way to meet people, and we had a real following, especially with high school kids.”
After closing the shop, he took jobs as title department manager for two local companies and worked in that field for more than 18 years until his retirement in December 2022.
Glotzer’s involvement with music began at age 6, when he started the piano lessons he would take until the seventh grade.
“I studied classical music and fought it tooth and nail as it just wasn’t resonating with me,” he said. “I sure wish that someone would have turned me on to another genre of music at the time. I was actually a pretty good pianist until I stopped playing.”
During his teens and early 20s he followed the Grateful Dead.
“They covered so many genres of music that it was all I needed to be musically satisfied,” he said. “My first show was in 1975, and I just kept going as it was such a great experience, particularly the crowd interaction but also the music. I must have seen way over 100 shows, which pales in comparison to how many times the die-hard Grateful Dead fans went to shows.”
The thing about seeing the Grateful Dead in big stadiums was that he felt like he was miles away from the stage. Then one day Bobby Weir, rhythm guitarist and vocalist, showed up at the Uptown, where Glotzer could photograph. He also photographed the band (after Jerry Garcia's death) at the Billy Graham Civic Auditorium.
“The moral of this story is that there have been lots of music icons in my life (Peter Frampton, Bobby Wier, Mickey Hart, Jimmy Cliff, Taj Mahal, to name a few) who I never imagined I would get to be 10 to 20 feet away from, not only to photograph but to listen to. It’s always a joy when I find myself a huge fan of a musician or band that I have the opportunity to photograph. I'm so passionate about photography that whether or not I’m a fan, I’m always excited to photograph musicians.”
Glotzer’s interest in photography was kindled as a child after his dad gifted him a small plastic camera that kicked out black-and-whites. After college he took a darkroom class in Boston followed by a variety of courses with mentor Ron Zak at Napa Valley College.
“Each year we went on class trips to places such as Italy and Eastern Europe, and we would get out there and shoot and get better,” he said. “Zak preached that there is only so much you could learn from books or instruction. He was right, and I’m still learning.”
Concert photography is especially challenging with low light, the inability to use flash (artist rider rules) and camera settings for photo composition. Many musical artists put a time limit of three songs on how long a photographer is allowed to shoot once the show begins.
“I try not to adjust my photos too much other than the typical adjustments that any photographer generally makes (contrast, lighting, exposure, white balance),” Glotzer said. “There is an Adobe product called Lightroom which is my ‘go-to’ (as well as most photographers) for making adjustments in images. I use Photoshop every now and then for some more detailed refining of images, but for the most part I can do everything in Lightroom.”
He said the challenge he now faces is not so much editing individual photos but taking the time to delete the photos he never intends to use because the composition isn't great or the image is blurry.
“I just counted last year, and it looks like I have photographed about 120 to130 different artists, including BottleRock, at which I photographed about 24 different artists,” he said. “I'd say that I attend 100 concerts per year, and on busy weekends I may attend two on one night.
“While my focus in on the performer, photos of fans — people shots — can be equally important at festivals. I love this huge part of being there, running into people I know, the energy of the audience and meeting new people and sometimes the artist.
“Someday, I would like to do an exhibit of just the people at shows!”
If today's story captured your interest, explore these related articles:
Bob McClenahan captures Napa Valley’s story, one frame at a time
Napa's BottleRock announces La Onda, a new Latin music festival
Evy Warshawski is a longtime advocate for the arts in Napa Valley.
Thank you, Evy, for this delightful profile of a most talented photographer. Though best known for his spectacular action images of pop artists, Mitchell's photos of concerts with the Vallejo Festival Orchestra are classics that have graced the pages of print media and websites in the bay area.
Mitchell's smile says it all...