Steve Schapiro, Photojournalist Who Bore Witness, Dies at 87 (original) (raw)
Arts|Steve Schapiro, Photojournalist Who Bore Witness, Dies at 87
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/arts/steve-schapiro-dead.html
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The Selma march, 1965.Credit...Steve Schapiro; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
He documented the civil rights movement and subjects as diverse as narcotics users, migrant workers and movie stars, seeking to capture their emotional heart.
The Selma march, 1965.Credit...Steve Schapiro; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
- Published Jan. 24, 2022Updated Jan. 27, 2022
Steve Schapiro, a photojournalist and social documentarian who bore witness to some of the most significant political and cultural moments and movements in modern American history, starting in the 1960s with the struggle for racial equality across the Jim Crow South, died on Jan. 15 at his home in Chicago. He was 87.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Maura Smith, said.
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Steve Schapiro’s photo of the Memphis hotel room of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after he was shot in 1968. Mr. Schapiro blended it with his image of the shooter James Earl Ray’s handprint, which he photographed in the boarding house across the street, from which Mr. Ray had shot Dr. King.Credit...Steve Schapiro; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
Over a six-decade career, Mr. Schapiro trained his camera’s eye on an astonishing array of people across the American landscape as he sought to capture the emotional heart of his subjects, whether they were narcotics users in Harlem, migrant workers in Arkansas or movie luminaries in Hollywood.
“I enjoy waiting for that moment when I sense something about someone,” Mr. Schapiro said in a 2017 interview with David Fahey, a friend and owner of the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.
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1964, Oxford, Ohio, where Freedom Summer, a campaign to register Black voters, began.Credit...Steve Schapiro; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
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The Selma to Montgomery marches, 1965.Credit...Steve Schapiro; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
As a freelance photographer in the 1960s for Life and Look, the oversize magazines that brought photojournalism into American homes, Mr. Schapiro documented the struggle for civil rights. When those magazines folded in the early 1970s or scaled back, he moved to Los Angeles and made his living by producing promotional material for movies, album covers and portraits of celebrities.
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