steve schapiro ’55
capturing history by Tim Davis ’91
Whether or not history is written by the victors, it is photographed by those who are present. Roger Fenton may have moved a few cannonballs onto the blasted road to Sebastopol, but no one doubts he was an observer of the Crimean War. So history is pictured by its witnesses, and Steve Schapiro ’55 has been witness to a vivid swath of America’s culture and content. He became interested in photography during summer camp in northern Vermont, developing his own film and “seeing beautiful cumulus clouds rise up from the clear chemical solutions onto my small deckle-edged prints.” At Bard, Schapiro decided to become a writer. During tutorials with Saul Bellow the two would walk in the woods discussing Dostoevsky: “There was a discipline to understanding how to write a sentence or a paragraph so as to form a picture . . . which has helped me all my life, although I almost flunked creative writing.” Like Walker Evans, after college Schapiro moved to Paris to become a writer. And like Evans, came back with his literary tail between his legs. His own book consisted of only four good pages, he said; but he had discovered Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, which, for many photographers of Schapiro’s era, served as a clarion call. For those who were called, Life magazine was the ideal score. The weekly was a central portal connecting mid-century America with its vision of the world. Before I’d ever read Life, I’d been flattened by that moment in J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey where Franny describes “the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-Bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and the responsibilities of the Westport and Oyster Bay Parent-Teacher Association, and God knows what else that’s gloriously normal.” Schapiro’s journey to the center of American photojournalism began with self-directed projects in Arkansas following migrant workers, resulting in warm, generous, fluid images: his first publications. These he took weekly to Peggy Sargent, a photo editor at Life, who gave him assignments for the magazine. From the beginning, Schapiro saw little difference between documenting news events and photographing celebrities, both staples of the mid-century photojournalist’s diet. Photographers like solving problems, and Schapiro says that no matter what his subject, he is “looking for the same thing: a moment that shows the spirit of the subject or the moment at hand.” More has been written about the artists—Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, et al.—who took the CartierBressonian photojournalist’s visual vocabulary and stretched it into
complex and abrasive voices than about its more faithful practitioners. But the Life photographer’s palette—lyrical, flowing images that house their subjects in abstract backdrops and use the frame for visual puns and rhyming grace notes—is a tradition that becomes evident every time you refresh the New York Times website. Schapiro’s pictures are consistently both formal and casual. They are conscious of form: the patterned tapestry that is the photographic frame and how its subject graces a ground. And yet they feel made by a person in the room (in the first person) rather than by an omniscient, objectivish eye (in the third person). They show us a world that is gravitational, gyroscopic, ever-changing, made by a man who is always interested in reminding us how well he is telling his story (and one possible reason why he received the prestigious James Joyce Award this year from the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin). I hear a little “I win” when I look at Schapiro’s picture of the young Muhammad Ali combing his hair in a barbershop mirror. It is the victorious exhale of a photographer knowing he has done more than just his job. He has an audience with a newborn star going nova. He has made a visually exciting picture with bold, diagonal energy in pure, American, democratic, fluorescent light. And he has described something about Ali that it is hard to argue isn’t real: the spectral redolence of his self-regard. This year, with the passing of Ali and David Bowie, two of his best-known subjects, Schapiro has demonstrated how vital it is for photographers to look hard at the present. Young practitioners, like my own first-year students at Bard, tend to want to add gravity to their images by photographing old stuff. They think they can make a Walker Evans by photographing an old gas station or crumbling downtown strip. They forget that it wasn’t the past for Evans; it was the present. Steve Schapiro snuck onto the set of potent, groaning, postwar America and depicted it in its most important, mainstream idiom. Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Andy Warhol, René Magritte, Rosa Parks, Truman Capote, Samuel Beckett. We remember these figures because of what they did. We feel we know them because of how photographers like Steve Schapiro depicted them. And he continues to do so, working on projects about young people seeking a way out of today’s maelstroms, and an upcoming book, Misericordia, about a large campus in Chicago for people with disabilities. This may be another lesson he learned at Bard: how never to tire of the process of looking deeply and compassionately at the world. Tim Davis ’91 is associate professor of photography. capturing history 15