Steve Schapiro

Steve Schapiro (1934 – 2022) was born in New York City. His formal education in photography began when he studied under W. Eugene Smith. Beginning in 1961, Schapiro worked as a freelance photojournalist. His photographs appeared internationally in the pages and on the covers of magazines, including Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, and People.

An activist as well as a documentarian, Schapiro covered many stories related to the Civil Rights Movement, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the push for voter registration, and the third Selma to Montgomery march.

In the 1970s, as picture magazines like Look folded, Schapiro shifted his attention to Hollywood and produced advertising materials, publicity stills, and posters for such classic films as The Godfather and Taxi Driver.

Schapiro later returned to his primary interests: photojournalism and social justice.

Schapiro is famous for his photographs of Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali, David Bowie, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Robert F. Kennedy, Barbra Streisand, Bill Evans, and Samuel Beckett among other notable figures.

Monographs of Schapiro’s work include the award-winning American Edge (2000), a book about the spirit of the turbulent decade of the 1960s in America, and the Lucie award-winning The Fire Next Time with James Baldwin's text and Schapiro's civil rights photos from 1963 to 1968.

Schapiro’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the High Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

In 2017, Schapiro won the Lucie Award for Achievement in Photojournalism.