Showing posts with label American Flag. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Flag. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Stanley Forman, photographer behind iconic Pulitzer-winning images hangs up his lens

 Via The Forward

January 12, 2022


photo of  Joseph Rakes (L) uses an American flag to attack civil rights lawyer and activist Ted Landsmark (R) during protests over the Boston busing crisis, Apr. 5, 1976
‘The Soiling of Old Glory’ won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Spot Photography. In it teen Joseph Rakes (L) uses an American flag to attack civil rights lawyer and activist Ted Landsmark (R) during protests over the Boston busing crisis, Apr. 5, 1976.


Gallery photographer Stanley Forman has retired after 55 years cruising the streets of Boston in search of breaking news.


"If there’s a definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, it’s “The Soiling of Old Glory” — Stanley Forman’s spot news winner for the Boston Herald American in 1976. In it, a youth turns an American flag into a weapon to use against a Black man at a school busing protest.

Then again, make that two definitive photos: The year before, Forman also won the Pulitzer for spot news with a harrowing image of a woman and her goddaughter falling out of the sky in his photo, “Fire Escape Collapse.”

Forman, 76, who began in newspapers in 1966 and switched to TV news videography two decades later, spent 55 years cruising the streets of Boston in search of breaking news, much of that time in a gas-guzzling Mercury Monarch. He retired on Dec. 31.

Or so he says.

“I have a great home life,” he said by phone from his home in Boston’s northern suburbs on the first weekend of the rest of his life. His primary plan is providing daycare for his four-month-old grandson, adding: “And I can do a limited amount of chasing on my own.” 

Read full article here   Jewish photographer who won Pulitzer retires – The Forward


Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Once Upon a Time… Veteran photog Steve Schapiro serves up poignant history





Boy with Flag, Selma March, 1965



Via The Santa Fe Reporter
July 1, 2014
By Enrique Limón


 More than 50 iconic photographs by LIFE veteran Steve Schapiro go on display this Saturday at Monroe Gallery’s Once Upon a Time in America.


Over the last five decades, Schapiro has documented the transcendent and the mundane surrounding some of the country’s greatest battles, accomplishments and cultural milestones—ranging from Robert F.Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign to candid moments depicting Marlon Brando on the set of The Godfather.


 A lifelong practitioner of the craft, Schapiro developed a love for photography at age 9, when he would try to emulate the shots of the father of photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson.


“This is a show about America and different aspects of America,” Schapiro tells SFR from his Chicago home.


 Aspects like 1965’s MLK-led Selma to Montgomery marches.


 “It was really a turning point, in the sense that so many people were mobilized,” Schapiro reminisces, “because, really what a lot of the Civil Rights movement was about was trying to energize people in the South—particularly black people—to vote and to feel that it was safe to vote and that they could vote, despite the fact that the culture of the times was against them.”


Witnessing several interruptions and threats of violence during the marches, Schapiro kept on shooting and at one point captured a youth resting under the shadow of an American flag.


“It’s symbolic of the spirit that kids have regarding their feelings that things were only going to get better, and that nonviolence was the proper course to take."


That particular picture wasn’t selected by magazine editors at the time, but was like many in his oeuvre, one that came to be by chance after he went through his old contact sheets.


 “Sometimes you look at pictures and you don’t know why they’re iconic or why people relate to them,” he says. “It’s a subtle thing, but there are just moments where all of that happens and the image presents a statement that goes in some ways beyond what you’re seeing.”


 Once Upon a Time in America
Opening Reception with Steve Schapiro: 5-7 pm Saturday, July 5
Exhibition continues through September 21, 2014
 Monroe Gallery of Photography
112 Don Gaspar Ave., 992-0800
www.monroegallery.com