Steve Shapiro. Living America

In early 2013 the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography in New York hosted American photographer Steve Shapiro’s retrospective “Living America”. In the dashing 1960s, Shapiro traveled all over America from coast to coast to document the people, their lives, and the issues that plagued them. His photo essays have been published in Life, Time, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, People, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair.

Photo: Steve Shapiro

We thank Olga Korovina for her help in preparing this publication,

Courtesy of the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography

for providing photos for the publication.

1. Bob Mackie and Ray Ajian. Mannequins of Pop Divas, Los Angeles. 1974

Shapiro’s goal was to create a portrait of an era, showing in this cross section of time the iconic figures and ordinary people who later gave birth to a new generation of America. The exhibition includes more than 100 photographs from that period, covering major events in the social, political, and cultural life of the United States on topics such as civic expression, portraits of icons of the art and music scenes, and genre street photography of the 1960s.

Shapiro was well acquainted with different social circles, Harlem druggies and Hollywood celebrities fell into his lens. Despite this thematic differentiation, each of his photographs is a precise composition and a perfect balance of black and white.

Shapiro’s career began in 1961, during the so-called “golden age of photojournalism.”. As both a documentarian and an activist, Shapiro was able to document the rise and rise of the hippie movement, the Vietnam War protests, the Civil Rights Movement rallies, including the Selma-Montgomery March for equal voting rights and the March on Washington 1963 , during which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Later Shapiro was the first photographer on the scene of Martin Luther King’s murder – it was his legendary photos of this tragedy that flew around the world.

2. Robert Kennedy’s election campaign, California. 1966

All of this makes Steve Shapiro’s photography incredibly relevant for today’s America, because it was in that distant ’60s that the United States was building an equal civil society. People stood up for themselves, using exclusively nonviolent resistance methods, influencing and ultimately changing the history of their country.

Shapiro didn’t skimp on the bustling art scene of the time: the exhibit includes portraits of Francis Bacon and René Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenberg. He literally documented the life of Andy Warhol’s Factory studio, worked on many projects with Barbra Streisand and David Bowie, and created famous portraits of Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Simon & Garfunkel, Tina Turner and Yves Montand. It was he who managed to capture the character and special charisma of such famous actors and directors as Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Katharine Hepburn and Mia Farrow, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. His “heroes” were Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Muhammad Ali, Robert Kennedy, Truman Capote and Samuel Beckett.

A separate room in “Living America” exhibition was dedicated to the special project “The Godfather. The Family Album, featuring color photographs by Steve Shapiro taken during the filming of Coppola’s legendary trilogy. In addition to recognizable images – Marlon Brando with his cat, a dying Pacino and the famous “whisperer” – the exhibit included photographs never before published.

Steve Shapiro’s work is in the Smithsonian Institution Washington , the High Museum of Art Atlanta , and the National Portrait Gallery Washington . Shapiro has had solo exhibitions recently in Los Angeles Fahey/Klein Gallery , Amsterdam Wouter van Leeuwn Gallery , London Hamiltons Gallery and Paris Gallerie Thierry Marlat . His photo books were published by Taschen, Arena Editions and PowerHouse Books.

3. Barbra Streisand with a pearl earring. Los Angeles. 1960-e

Excerpts from an interview with Steve Shapiro

– When I started working, it was a time called “the golden age of journalistic photography.”. If you had ideas, you could always find a magazine that would hire you, pay your expenses, to make a story. That’s not the case now – it’s a much tougher time for young photographers, it’s hard to find a place where their work would be needed. And if you don’t see that your work is needed, it’s a little discouraging.

There are two of the most important things in photography. One of the things I keep repeating: everyone sees the subject differently, we all see the world around us in our own way. For instance, there are three photographers who see the world the same way, but their photographs are completely different. They are all famous photographers, but at the same time they are totally different, which is why each of them has a different point of view.

It’s important for a young photographer to develop his or her own way of seeing, the way of looking at things. And the other important detail is to shoot what you care about, because if you care about your characters, emotionally you’re involved in what you’re doing.

Another important point: digital photography allows you to see the photos as soon as the shutter clicks. And you have to look at what you’ve photographed and ask yourself: how can I do it better?? What can I do to make this photo special? How can I add more emotion to it?? I have to feel the person I’m photographing, feel their soul..

– John Kennedy was the one who gave me the most respect. And he was a very adored person. It was very important for him to feel like a president, because it was obvious to him: he can change the direction of the country to create a state that truly cares about its citizens and all its people.

And it wasn’t a quest for money or power and it wasn’t the satisfaction of my ego. He didn’t want to say, “Hey, I’m president of the United States, or I aspire to be president of the United States.”. It was something much more than that: he felt that he wanted to help people, that he wanted to make the world a better place and make a better country, make it more caring to people who needed support and needed more help than they were getting now. I wanted to use the photographs to show how people loved him, how people cared about him, because I knew: he cared about them..

– Sometimes you meet people who don’t want to be photographed. They have to agree because all the PR people say it’s good. I worked with a famous writer, his name was Robber Lowell, he’s a famous American poet. And I was doing a story for a magazine

Life. I could tell he wanted to be in Life magazine, but at the same time he was so pathetic that the idea of being printed in Life didn’t seem so good to him. He never once offered me a cup of coffee, and I worked with him for six or seven days in his house, and I was never offered a cup of coffee or anything else in that house! You could tell he was just doing it because he had to.

– I had to work with people who made me feel relaxed, I could have fun with them, it was kind of an adventure. And if you’re lucky, that kind of work turns into a collaboration. One of those people was Steve Martin.

I did the poster for Parenthood. I bought a huge couch – one where everybody could fit on it, and Steve had to stand during the shoot. Steve asked me, “What if I keep the kids upside down?”. And this became a poster! Sometimes collaborating with talented people helps a lot, they come to you with ideas which are better than yours.

– I worked with Woody Allen on “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.”. It was funny because all the situations were funny, all the characters were funny, and the whole movie was very relaxed and funny.

– Dustin Hoffman. The wonderful thing about Dustin is that he has a wonderful sense of humor and he’s always relaxed, he jokes all the time, he’s a pleasure to spend time with.

– I grew up in New York. As a teenager, I visited the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art every weekend. There was a painting by Velázquez, it depicted an old man that I loved to look at every week. I’ve always loved to draw. Of contemporary artists, I like Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud.

– A lot of photographers love Robert Frank for his book The Americans, for its strong emotional photographs. He inspired a whole generation of photographers, including me.

I love Henri Cartier-Bresson for his ability to catch a decisive moment which I also tried to replicate.

Irvin Penn, whose photos are very stylish, they convey to you the feelings of the people he shot.

Walker Evans and Dorothea Lang, who created powerful images of 1930s America during the Great Depression.

– I don’t know much about contemporary American photography. I know Rodchenko. Everybody knows Rodchenko! And I like what he did stylistically with all his angles and t. p.

4. Dustin Hoffman and director Bob Foss, Miami. 1981

5. Truman Capote with his cat, Holcomb, Kansas. 1967

6. Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick and surroundings, New York. 1965

7. René Magritte, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1965

8. Girls Under the Bridge, Coney Island, New York. 1960

9. A woman with a poodle in a beauty salon, New York. 1961

10. Woody Allen with an ant on a leash