These icons of the socially and politically turbulent '60s are the subjects of Schapiro's most recent anthology of photographs, "American Edge." The collection has no standouts, which is not to say that it is without photographs that are particularly striking. On the contrary, each print is uniquely captivating. I don't consider myself a patient museum-goer by any means, yet the unabashed genuineness of Schapiro's work compelled me to consider each shot of the monograph slowly and carefully. I must have looked like a real photography buff the afternoon I visited the Mead Art Museum exhibition, rather than the college-girl appreciator of art that I am, one who stumbles through the Uffizi in about an hour and has kissy Robert Doisneaus and black-and-white rock star posters on her walls. Schapiro's work is intricate, yet accessible.
An unassuming presence
After being so impressed during my visit to the collection, I was considerably nervous to meet the man behind the camera, but Schapiro's unassuming manner immediately put me at ease. His quick, dark eyes, behind thin wire-rimmed frames, did not hesitate to smile, and when I asked if I could record the conversation he used a nonchalant "cool" to express the affirmative. His crisp white oxford and silver crew cut gave him a look of intelligent chic, and during conversation Schapiro maintained a low-key tone wholly without pretension. Greeting a packed room of students and other admirers at a talk accompanying the gallery reception, Schapiro hardly seemed to notice the enthusiastic applause that welcomed him and casually opened with, "Hi, guys-this isn't a lecture."
The audience remained captivated throughout the talk, which highlighted shots from "American Edge" as well as photos that mark the distinctive eras of his career. During the '60s, Schapiro's work expanded beyond his celebrated photos of known personalities: he also chronicled the trials of migrant workers in Arkansas (1961), Sioux families of the Pine Ridge Reservation and rural black communities in North Carolina (1963). Schapiro captured these collections in black and white, though many slides from his later career are in color. Rather than showing his well loved "The Godfather" photograph of an unforgettably shadowed Marlon Brando stroking a cat, Schapiro commented comically on his shot for the cover of a Jane Fonda workout video. Schapiro has worked extensively with the film industry (he also did the poster for "Midnight Cowboy," among many others) and currently produces socially aware documentaries such as "Viet Nam Vets," "The Mentally Disturbed and the Prison System" and "Survivors of Jim Crow."
Say "Jacqueline Kennedy," and without fail an image will form in the head of your listener. There she is-smiling, confident, elegant-perhaps with her slender forearms in half-sleeved white gloves. When Schapiro photographed the former First Lady, however, he captured something beyond her trademark stateliness. Her unwavering poise is present, of course, but the microphone in the prominent space beside her and the men behind her, none smiling and all examining, create an image considerably more substantial than the pristine belle-of-the-ball representations that plastered American media at the time of her 1994 death.
"It's a picture that I particularly like of her," Schapiro related. "It's an interesting picture in terms of media awareness. We live in an era when everyone is very aware of media, and people who are public performers compose themselves in such a way that they are sort of nonchalant to media, but truly they are putting their best face forward. She was certainly an incredible icon of American culture, but she also had an awareness of the image that she projected."
At the time of the 1963 shot, Schapiro had a "media awareness" of his own as a fledgling photographer, and had to be clever to capture the images he desired. "It was at an airport ceremony in Washington, D.C. and the regular-usually news-photographers would hold spots hours in advance where they thought they could get the best pictures. What I would generally do is come in late and come crawling under their legs. That's one of the reason it's a low-angle picture."
Several years later, Schapiro traveled on one of Robert Kennedy's campaign tours. In Schapiro's 1966 photo, Kennedy appears godlike in the back of a convertible, his humble smile emerging from an anemone of outstretched arms. "I think that Robert Kennedy was one of the most charismatic people of his time," Schapiro said. "I think he never expected to be a front runner. He was not a particularly good speaker; he was extremely shy. He was a person who had intelligence, a sense of concern and caring for people and he also knew how to play politics. I think that the Kennedys created an era in America where everyone strove for excellence and in every field people thought things would get better and better. It was followed by the Nixon era, when it became, 'what's in it for me?'"
Where are the pictures?
If the Nixon era rendered the sociopolitical environment increasingly harsh, so too became the world of the photographer. "When I started out, if you did serious stories you had a very good chance of getting them into a magazine because there were so many magazines: we had Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post ... usually these magazines ran stories of four to eight pages with a lot of pictures," he said.
"Today there are very few magazines that use photoessays-usually they'll sum up a situation with one picture, and that picture has to be primarily information-oriented. The emotional aspects will come in a secondary manner-they're important, but not as important as telling you what the event was about. So for younger photographers starting up today it's much harder to find your way in."
Although media format has indeed changed significantly, it has never been easy to succeed as a professional photographer, and Schapiro modestly de-emphasizes the talent and hard work that it must have taken to get started himself. Born and raised in New York City, Schapiro attended Amherst before transferring to and graduating from Bard College. Upon graduation, Schapiro then worked with the photographer W. Eugene Smith, who influenced him with his humanistic approach to the photoessay.
"I started doing a projects of my own. I did a series on migrant workers, and I did a series on narcotics addiction in East Harlem. Through that, I got to work for Life magazine, and with [those] credentials I was allowed to get close to a lot of situations, because public figures definitely wanted to be in Life magazine. It was a period of time when the magazine photographer was a very important element in terms of reaching the public," Schapiro said. Concerned for young photographers who can't reach the public, he is currently working on a web magazine to create a forum for new talent.
Considering the gravelly years of his early career and his later mingling with Hollywood glitterati, it difficult to imagine that its roots are partly wedged here, among quiet tree-lined paths and dusty (albeit lovely) professors that more typically nurture, say, surgeons or consultants. "I think Amherst gave me the background to see the world in a better way and understand the world in a better way, and to understand the complexities of the world in a better way," Schapiro raved. "It gives you an edge. An education such as Amherst's is not essential for a photographer or anyone with a career such as mine, but it helps you understand the world and all of its complexities, as well as the general philosophy of the human condition."