Steve McQueen: Unpublished Photos of the King of Cool

 John Dominis/Time Inc.: At his home in Palm Springs, McQueen practices his aim before heading out for a shooting session in the desert

Via Life.com


In the spring of 1963, Steve McQueen was on the brink of superstardom, already popular from his big-screen breakout as one of The Magnificent Seven and just a couple months away from entering the Badass Hall of Fame with the release of The Great Escape.

Intrigued by his dramatic backstory and his off-screen exploits — McQueen was a reformed delinquent who got his thrills racing cars and motorcycles — LIFE sent the great photographer John Dominis to California to hang out with the 33-year-old actor and, in effect, see what he could get.

Three weeks and more than 40 rolls of film later, Dominis had captured some astonishingly intimate and now-iconic images — photos impossible to imagine in today’s utterly restricted-access celebrity universe. Only a handful of those photos were ever published. Here, LIFE.com presents a series of previously unpublished gems from what Dominis would look back on as one of his favorite assignments, along with insights about the time he spent with the man who would soon don the mantle, “the King of Cool.”

Full slide show here.

June 5, 1968: “How many people died because of that assassination?"

Via Conneticut Magazine


When the gunshots that mortally wounded Sen. Robert F. Kennedy rang out in a California hotel that fateful night 44 years ago, Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge was right behind the Democratic presidential candidate. Eppridge didn’t panic or run; instead he did what he had risked his life to do in Vietnam—he took pictures and recorded history.

“I was about 12 feet behind [Kennedy] and I heard the shots start,” Eppridge says in the living room of the New Milford home he shares with his wife, Adrienne. In his 70s, Eppridge has dark hair and a deep, penetrating stare. When he talks about his days with Kennedy he speaks slowly and deliberately, as if he’s reliving each moment.

The assassination took place at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968. The shots were fired by 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan, and Eppridge himself was nearly hit by a stray bullet.

“One man [Paul Schrade], who was about four or five feet in front of me, standing directly in line with me and Sirhan, took a bullet in the head,” he says. Immediately, Eppridge began taking pictures. “One of the first thoughts that came to my mind was that JFK, when he had been shot, there were no still photographic records made of that. I thought now you’ve changed your job, you’re a historian.”

Among the photographs Eppridge took that night is the haunting image of a fallen Kennedy being cradled in the arms of Juan Romero, an Ambassador Hotel busboy who had shaken hands with the candidate just moments before. That powerful picture captured by Eppridge has become one of the enduring images of the assassination.
It was just that day that Kennedy had agreed to let Eppridge be a part of his immediate entourage for the night. Eppridge says that after making his speech, Kennedy left the hotel’s Embassy Room ballroom the same way he came into it—through the kitchen, despite the repeated protests of his lone bodyguard, William Barry. (It was only after the shooting that the Secret Service began protecting presidential candidates.)
“Barry knew the ropes and he knew that you don’t go out of a room the same way you came in,” Eppridge explains.

He had photographed Kennedy two years earlier and on the campaign trail they’d become friends, but at first Eppridge could not take time to grieve for his fallen friend. “After Frank Mankiewicz [Kennedy’s press secretary] announced that Bobby was gone, I went back to New York and met the plane there when they brought him in, photographed the funeral at St. Patrick’s, took that train ride to Washington, and then I cried,” he says.

If Kennedy hadn’t been murdered, Eppridge believes that history would have taken a vastly different course. “I don’t think people realize the significance of that assassination and what would have happened had he not been shot,” Eppridge says. He believes Kennedy would have became president instead of Republican Richard Nixon and would have ended the Vietnam War immediately—saving the lives of more than 20,000 American soldiers and tens of thousands of North and South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

“How many people died because of that assassination?” Eppridge asks. “That’s stuck with me, it bothers me.”

In addition to the tragic end of the Kennedy campaign, Eppridge covered many iconic moments in the 1960s for Life magazine, including the Beatles’ arrival in America in 1964 and the Woodstock music festival in 1969. In 2008, he compiled his photographs and wrote about his time with Kennedy in the book A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties.

Eppridge doesn’t subscribe to any of the many conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination, especially that there was a second gunman and more than eight shots fired that night.

“Somebody had supposedly taped 16 gunshots; there were not [16 shots],” he says. “I counted the number of shots and there were eight. So all this stuff about there being somebody else there shooting—no, there wasn’t.”

Besides security being light around the candidate, the campaign was very open, making Kennedy an easy target. Also, Sirhan is on record saying that he hated Kennedy because of his support of Israel.

“One plus one equals two sometimes,” Eppridge says. “I really think it was just one wacko, and a number of guys who were on that campaign have also said that, but you know, you can always be wrong. Always.”

This article appeared in the June 2012 issue of Connecticut Magazine


Related: Bill Eppridge: An American Treasure Review "An Eye On The Times"

BRIAN HAMILL: "has contributed to some of the most memorable images taken during the 60’s and 70’s"

Brian Hamill: Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, Brooklyn, 1979


Via The Impossible Cool


Ansel Adams was once quoted as saying “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” A man this could not ring truer for is photographer Brian Hamill. A New York City native that has seen it all,

The image above of De Niro and Pesci first caught my eye from Brian’s catalog of work, but as you start to dig, the faces that shaped our world in the 1960’s and 70’s begin to emerge from behind his lens.

Recently I sat down with him at my local coffee spot, Minerva Cafe, to hear a few stories and to provide a link between images on this site and the eye behind them. After the break is our conversation along with a few photos you might recognize. Enjoy. (Full post here)

Brian Hamill

Visit Monroe Gallery of Photography (Booth #419) during the AIPAD Photography Show March 28 - April 1 to view some of Brian Hamill's photographs.

Related: Brian Hamill Remembers John Lennon

John Lennon, Rooftop of The Dakota, 1975

History, Lived and Documented

The Beatles at the Plaza Hotel, February 7, 1964 Bill Eppridge

©The Albuquerue Journal North
By Malin Wilson Powell
on Fri, Nov 4, 2011

Ignorance of history, like many omissions, happens effortlessly and silently in the contemporary barrage of day-to-day life. The photojournalism of Bill Eppridge is a sobering reminder of the necessity of a common history to a civilized society. The Monroe Gallery is presenting three major Eppridge photo essays from the tumultuous ’60s when he was on assignment for Life magazine (1961-1972), plus a smattering of individual iconic images up to 2007.

One of the most striking aspects of Eppridge’s work is his impeccable instinct for orientation. Eppridge’s photographs bear witness to his ability for in capturing powerful images by constantly honing and adjusting his physical and ethical compass. He not only finds the right place to frame the uncertainties of life unfolding in front of him, but he does this by continually refining the right frame of mind. This holds true whether he might be hanging out of a helicopter with his editor holding onto his ankles, or “sticking with” the Beatles on their first 1964 American tour, or whether he could keep his bearings in the most extreme and devastating situation – Robert Kennedy’s assassination on June 5, 1968.

Bobby Kennedy’s extraordinary vitality and traumatic death were clearly defining experiences for Eppridge, who never accepted another political assignment after the senator’s death. His first assignment with Bobby Kennedy was in 1966 when the young politician was testing the waters for a presidential bid in 1968. During this grueling eight-month campaign Eppridge took thousands of photographs in both black-and-white and color, always “staying close” to the candidate every single day and night.

Robert F. Kennedy in front of a poster of his brother, Columbus, Ohio, 1968
Bill Eppridge ©Time Inc.

The access, rawness and intimacy of Eppridge’s photos are hard to comprehend while immersed in today’s packaged news. As the photographer has noted, “The press is controlled in such a way today that you almost never see the real person you are photographing. You’re taking pictures of what their handlers want you to see.”

Everywhere Bobby Kennedy campaigned he insisted on a convertible to greet the eager crowds. Looking at his exposure and absence of security, the question arises: How could he do this after his brother John’s death in Dallas from a sniper while riding in a convertible? Yet, here are images of Bobby’s courage and enthusiasm for meeting his supporters. His hands and arms reach for them with an appetite as strong as theirs reaching for him. In a time when politicians demonstrate so much disdain for the average voter, these photographs are riveting proof of mutual openness, respect, even admiration.

The Kennedy campaign travels through the Watts section of Los Angeles on the last day before the primary, 1968


For anyone who lived through the ’60s and the repeated blows of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, their bankrupt slaughter still reverberates. Bobby was shot on the last night of his campaign, the evening he won the all-important California primary and when exhausted he left the press of the crowd by way of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen, where Sirhan Sirhan shot him and five others. Only 12 feet away, and almost certainly unhinged by the mayhem, Eppridge’s eye was steady and he remembers thinking: “You are not just a photojournalist; you’re a historian.” His photograph of the wounded senator is often described as a modern Pieta. It cannot be seen too often.

This is also true of Eppridge’s photo essay “Mississippi Burning: The James Chaney Funeral.” James Chaney was the one black civil-rights worker along with two young white civil rights workers who were kidnapped and murdered during “Freedom Summer” by the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. They were investigating the burning of Mt. Zion Methodist Church, a civil-rights training site. After an intense 44-day search, the bodies of Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer were found under 25 feet of dirt at a nearby earthen dam.

The dignity and sorrow that seep from Eppridge’s photos of the Chaney family bespeak wounds that can’t be healed. Suffused with an unflinching, upright gravitas, gallery viewers are noticeably stilled as they process through this deeply affecting black-and-white series: they whisper and stand taller. Not only is there the great graveside photo of Ben Chaney, the younger brother, shedding a tear in the embrace of his mother, there is an especially eerie photo of a troubled Ben looking straight at the camera, all alone with his grief in the middle of the image, bracketed by his parents and three sisters steeped in their own thoughts. Because of death threats, the Chaneys left Meridian, Miss., for New York City, and by 1969 Ben Chaney had joined the Black Panther Party. After 13 years in jail, he was paroled and has since established a foundation in his brother’s honor and worked as a legal clerk for former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who secured his parole. As the gallery text notes, only one of the 10 men responsible for the murders was prosecuted and incarcerated by the state of Mississippi, and that was in 2005.

Mrs. Chaney and young Ben, James Chaney funeral, Meridian, Mississippi, 1964
©Bill Eppridge

Eppridge has written eloquently about his craft and his art, including the unimaginable freedom his generation of photographers had to pursue truth during the 1960s golden era of photojournalism, inserting such anecdotes of a robust participant/observer as the perfect, unchoreographed ballet of a three-man CBS crew filming the Bobby Kennedy motorcade while in motion.

Looking back, the ’60s were terrible and wonderful, and certainly fulfilled the Chinese adage “May you all live in interesting times.” History is always in the making, but there aren’t always visual historians of Eppridge’s highly developed sensibilities to frame resonant and crucial junctures for posterity.

On Oct. 24, Bill Eppridge, born Guillermo Alfredo Eduardo Eppridge in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to American parents, was awarded the 2011 Lucie Award for Achievement in Photojournalism at Lincoln Center in New York. He is currently visiting Santa Fe and will be at the Monroe Gallery for a discussion of his work from 5 to 7 p.m. tonight.

If you go WHAT: Bill Eppridge
WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar
WHEN: Through Nov. 20.
HOURS: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday.
Gallery discussion with Bill Eppridge 5-7 p.m. tonight. Limited seating on a first-come, first-served basis.
CONTACT: 505-992-0800 or info@monroegallery.com

Suze Rotolo, Muse and Girlfriend to Bob Dylan, Dies at 67

Don Hunstein: Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo, New York, 1963




The New York Times
February 28, 2011, 1:16 pm
By William Grimes


Suze Rotolo, Muse and Girlfriend to Bob Dylan, Dies at 67


Suze Rotolo, who entered into a romantic relationship with Bob Dylan in the early 1960s as his career was just getting started and, in one of the signature images of the decades, walked with him arm-in-arm on the cover of his groundbreaking second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 67.


The cause was lung cancer, her husband, Enzo Bartoccioli, said on Monday.

Ms. Rotolo, whose nickname was pronounced su-zee, met Mr. Dylan in 1961 at a Riverside Church folk concert at which he was performing. She was 17; he was 20.

“Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” Mr. Dylan wrote in his memoir, “Chronicles: Volume 1,” published in 2004. “She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.”

In her own book, “A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the 60’s” (2008), Ms. Rotolo described Mr. Dylan as “oddly old-time looking, charming in a scraggly way.”

They began seeing each other and shared a walk-up apartment on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village.

Don Hunstein/Sony BMG Music Entertainment

Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan in their apartment in 1963

The relationship, lasting four years, was rocky. She was the daughter of Italian Communists with her own ideas about life, art and politics that made it increasingly difficult for her to fulfill the role of helpmate and, as she put it in her memoir, “boyfriend’s ‘chick,’ a string on his guitar.”

Her social views, especially her commitment to the civil rights movement and her work for the Congress for Racial Equality, had a strong influence on Mr. Dylan’s writing, as did her interest in theater and the visual arts, which exposed him to ideas and artists outside the world of music.

When, to his distress, she went to Italy in 1962 to study art at the University of Perugia, her absence inspired the plaintive Dylan love songs “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” He later wrote a song highly critical of her family, “Ballad in Plain D.”

Ms. Rotolo spent most of her adult life avoiding discussions of her relationship with Mr. Dylan and pursuing a career as an artist, but she relented after Mr. Dylan published his autobiography. She appeared as an interview subject in “No Direction Home,” Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary about Mr. Dylan, and wrote “A Freewheelin’ Time” in large part to tell her side of the Dylan story and to portray herself as more complicated than a muse.

A fuller obituary will be posted at nytimes.comhttp://www.nytimes.com/pages/obituaries/index.html.

REVIEW: " For anyone interested in the history of this mixed bag of a nation, "American Edge" the museum-quality Steve Schapiro photography exhibition at Monroe Gallery is not to be missed."

©The Albuquerque Journal
June 11, 2010

HISTORY THROUGH THE LENS


By Malin Wilson-Powell
For the Journal

For anyone interested in the history of this mixed bag of a nation, "American Edge" the museum-quality Steve Schapiro photography exhibition at Monroe Gallery through June 27 is not to be missed. The majority of 57 potent black-and-white images are from the tumultuous '60s, the beginning decade of Schapiro's lifetime in photojournalism. Born in New York City in 1944, Schapiro shot his earliest self-initiated documentary essays "Narcotics Addiction in East Harlem" and "Arkansas Migrant Workers" in 1960.

These independent projects brought him assignments from the big picture magazines of the day, including LIFE, Look and Rolling Stone. Schapiro was one of those meddling northerners who went south in 1965 to join the Selma to Montgomery marchers who were seeking the right to register to vote. The photographer heeded local advice to cut his hair and not to wear his leather jacket. Over the five days it took to complete the 54-mile march, the crowd grew from 4,000 to more than 25,000. Armed with his handheld 35 mm camera, Schapiro found the courage in those he documented (and in himself) to join a campaign that was met with overwhelming violence and that resulted in the deaths of two men — the Rev. James Reeb, a white pastor who was beaten to death, and Jimmy Lee Jackson, a black activist who was shot by a police officer.

While there are many differences that divide America's epochal 1960s from today, the similarities are deep enough to lay claim to the current American moment, where "edges" seem to have proliferated and feel ever more vertiginous. Although the '60s was an era when Barack Obama's election to president was an impossible dream, it was a time when many Americans believed they were making inevitable progress toward equality. A "post-racial" society with the end of racism and xenophobia seemed to be in site. More than 40 years later, tolerance seems the impossible dream. Despite our being globalized and electronically linked now, Schapiro's 1964 image of follow-the-leader white men in Florida carrying their "Segregation Forever" sign resonates with up-to-the minute virulence of anti-immigration hysteria, as well as the incendiary and rampant hate speech against our black president.

This exhibition appropriates the title of Schapiro's first and very deluxe monograph published in 2000 by Arena Editions (a now defunct press founded in Santa Fe). More than half of the silver prints in the gallery were first published as art in this book, including the two iconic images chosen for the end papers. On view (and used as the book's front end papers) is the ominous "Robert Kennedy in Berkeley, Calif., 1966," with Kennedy's dark silhouette looming over a sea of faces turned toward him and the sunshine. It is a prescient image of Kennedy's assassination two years later, when his demise left a huge black hole in the American political landscape and psyche.

Robert Kennedy at Berkeley, California, 1966

Also on view (and used as the book's back end papers) is the achingly resonant "Jerome Smith, Mississippi, 1965." No one could ask for a more perfect composition. Smith, a young Civil Rights worker in overalls, is framed in profile by his church doorway in the "thinker's pose," precisely echoing the pose of a pondering Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane as depicted in the church's stained glass window.

Schapiro has always acknowledged his debt to the renowned W. Eugene Smith, the photographer he tried to emulate, as he did Henri Cartier-Bresson. His monograph is dedicated simply to "Smith." Yet, for all his predecessors' greatness, Schapiro's work is not as sentimental as Smith's or as distant as Cartier-Bresson's. Schapiro's work is more self-conscious and feels more embedded in his generation's disorienting times. In light of earlier photojournalists, the tone of Schapiro's work is closer to WPA-era Dorothea Lange and Hungarian-born André Kertész.

Three Men, New York, 1961

In addition to multiple images of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, Schapiro captured many anonymous players who had their moment on the stage of the '60s, such as a bloody student at the Columbia University riots, lonely supermarket parking lot picketers, stoned flower children in Haight Ashbury, and frenzied go-go dancers. These unnamed actors are shot with the same involvement as his celebrity images, including Warhol's factory, the Kennedys' Camelot, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks, Janis Joplin, Ike and Tina Turner, Alan Ginsberg, and Samuel Becket. After popular magazine assignments started to wane, Schapiro began working for both the music and movie industries shooting Hollywood stars on the set, and his celebrity images retain the on-the-road grit of his photo journal essays.

Midnight Cowboy, New York,1969

Schapiro photographs are black-and-white silver prints (in limited editions of 25) and the magical emergence of images from negatives with wet chemicals darkroom, before transition to the now-dominant flat-screen digital technology. The tremendous power of his work reminded me of a very recent symposium (April 22) organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Thirteen leading American artists, curators and critics were invited to address the rather silly question "Is Photography Over," a variation on the old straw dog "Is Painting Dead?" Of course, this is an ever-ready topic raised by institutions and academics that need issues to discuss. But, just as with every other medium an artist chooses to use, yes, the medium is dead. Every medium is dead. It becomes art precisely when the artist breathes new life into it. Fortunately, for those of us who like looking at art, the medium is a tool of the artist and not a ghetto.

Also, if you like Steven Schapiro's photographs, keep your eyes open for the traveling exhibition "The High Road to Freedom: Photographs from the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968," organized by the High Museum of Art in 2008. Currently on view at the Bronx Museum of Art in New York City, review here.) The exhibition prominently features Schapiro's images documenting the legal end to American apartheid and it is currently "on the road," and, hopefully, like America, a work still in progress.

Exhibition continues through June 27
See the exhibition on-line here.

Read more: ABQJOURNAL NORTH/VENUE: History through the lens http://www.abqjournal.com/north/venuenorth/112255382101northvenue06-11-10.htm#ixzz0qXr0FbUC