Poor People’s Art: A (Short) Visual History of Poverty in the United States; Artist's talk with Nina Berman January 12

 

January 13 – March 4, 2023

University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum

Nina Berman: John Bonner and Richard Huntly, from the series The Black Boys of Dozier, 2013 

Thousands of boys, mainly black, passed through Dozier since it opened in 1901 as a reform school for wayward boys. But allegations over the years suggest it functioned more like a slave labor camp, with verified reports of children being hog tied and shackled. The name of the institution changed as each successive administration installed its own brand of punishment and forced labor, finally closing in 2011, not because of allegations, but according to the State, because of budget issues.

Panel discussion Thursday, January 12 with artists featured in Poor People’s Art: A (Short) Visual History of Poverty in the United States, including Nina Berman, Rico Gatson, and Jason Lazarus. Curator Christian Viveros-Fauné will lead the conversation exploring issues and topics addressed in the exhibition. This event is free and open to the public, Facebook live link here.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is well known for his “I Have a Dream” speech, yet much less emphasis is placed on his campaign to seek justice for America’s poor, “The Poor People’s Campaign.” This was a multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-racial movement aimed at uniting poor people and their allies to demand an end to poverty and inequality. Fifty-three years after Dr. King’s death, the Reverend William Barber II launched a contemporary push to fulfill MLK’s ambitious brief — one that calls for a “revolution of values” that unites poor and impacted communities across the country. The exhibition Poor People’s Art: A (Short) Visual History of Poverty in the United States represents a visual response to Dr. King’s “last great dream” as well as Reverend Barber’s recent “National Call for Moral Revival.”

With artworks spanning more than 50 years, the exhibition is divided into two parts: Resurrection (1968-1994) and Revival (1995-2022). Resurrection includes photographs, paintings, prints, videos, sculptures, books, and ephemera made by a radically inclusive company of American artists, from Jill Freedman's photographs of Resurrection City, the tent enclave that King's followers erected on the National Mall in 1968, to John Ahearns' plaster cast sculpture Luis Fuentes, South Bronx (1979). Revival offers contemporary engagement across a range of approaches, materials, and points of view. Conceived in a declared opposition to poverty, racism, militarism, environmental destruction, health inequities, and other interlocking injustices, this exhibition shows how artists in the US have visualized poverty and its myriad knock-on effects since 1968. Participating artists include John Ahearn, Nina Berman, Martha De la Cruz, Jill Freedman, Rico Gatson, Mark Thomas Gibson, Corita Kent, Jason Lazarus, Miguel Luciano, Hiram Maristany, Narsiso Martinez, Adrian Piper, Robert Rauschenberg, Rodrigo Valenzuela, William Villalongo & Shraddha Ramani.

Poor People’s Art is curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, CAM Curator-at-Large and organized by the USF Contemporary Art Museum.   Exhibition Press Release

PHOTOGRAPHER STEVE SCHAPIRO DIES AT 87

 

Steve Schapiro in Monroe Gallery, Santa Fe

Photograph by ©R. David Marks

January 16, 2022

Prolific photographer Steve Schapiro covered major historical events and captured seminal moments of the American Civil Rights Movement

Santa Fe, NM--Steve Schapiro died peacefully on January 15 surrounded by his wife, Maura Smith, and son, Theophilus Donoghue in Chicago, Illinois after battling pancreatic cancer. He was 87.

Steve Schapiro discovered photography at the age of nine at summer camp. Excited by the camera’s potential, Schapiro spent the next decades prowling the streets of his native New York City trying to emulate the work of French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, whom he greatly admired. His first formal education in photography came when he studied under the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith. Smith’s influence on Schapiro was far-reaching. He taught him the technical skills he needed to succeed as a photographer but also informed his personal outlook and worldview. Schapiro’s lifelong interest in social documentary and his consistently empathetic portrayal of his subjects is an outgrowth of his days spent with Smith and the development of a concerned humanistic approach to photography.

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, People and Paris Match. During the decade of the 1960s in America, called the “golden age in photojournalism,” Schapiro produced photo-essays on subjects as varied as narcotics addition, Easter in Harlem, the Apollo Theater, Haight-Ashbury, political protest, the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy, poodles and presidents. A particularly poignant story about the lives of migrant workers in Arkansas, produced in 1961 for Jubilee and picked up by the New York Times Magazine, both informed readers about the migrant workers’ difficult living conditions and brought about tangible change—the installation of electricity in their camps.

©Steve Schapiro: Migrant Bean Pickers, Arkansas, 1961

An activist as well as 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 Selma to Montgomery march. Called by Life to Memphis after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Schapiro produced some of the most iconic images of that tragic event.

©Steve Schapiro

Martin Luther King Marching for Voting Rights with John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Douglas, James Forman and Ralph Abernathy, Selma, 1965

In the 1970s, as picture magazines like Look folded, Schapiro shifted attention to film. With major motion picture companies as his clients, Schapiro produced advertising materials, publicity stills, and posters for films as varied as The Godfather, The Way We Were, Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, Rambo, Risky Business, and Billy Madison. He also collaborated on projects with musicians, such as Barbra Streisand and David Bowie, for record covers and related art.

Schapiro’s photographs have been widely reproduced in magazines and books related to American cultural history from the 1960s forward, civil rights, and motion picture film. Monographs of Schapiro’s work include American Edge (2000); a book about the spirit of the turbulent decade of the 1960s in America, and Schapiro’s Heroes (2007), which offers long intimate profiles of ten iconic figures: Muhammad Ali, Andy Warhol, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Ray Charles, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Barbra Streisand and Truman Capote. Schapiro’s Heroes was the winner of an Art Directors Club Cube Award. Taschen released The Godfather Family Album: Photographs by Steve Schapiro in 2008, followed by Taxi Driver (2010), both initially in signed limited editions. This was followed by Then And Now (2012), Bliss about the changing hippie generation (2015), BOWIE (2016),

Misericordia (2016) an amazing facility for people with developmental problems, and in 2017 books about Muhammad Ali and Taschen’s Lucie award-winning The Fire Next Time with James Baldwin’s text and Schapiro’s Civil Rights photos from 1963 to 1968. At the time of his death, Schapiro was working on a book of his photographs of Andy Warhol (Taschen) and a book pairing his photographs alongside his son Theophilus’s photography.

Since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s seminal 1969 exhibition, Harlem on my Mind, which included a number of his images, Schapiro’s photographs have appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions world-wide. The High Museum of Art’s Road to Freedom, which traveled widely in the United States, includes numerous of his photographs from the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. Recent one-man shows have been mounted in Los Angeles, London, Santa Fe, Amsterdam, Paris. And Berlin. Steve has had large museum retrospective exhibitions in the United States, Spain, Russia, and Germany.

Schapiro continued to work in a documentary vein. His recent series of photographs have been about India, music festivals, the Christian social activist Shane Claiborne, and Black Lives Matter.

In 2017, Schapiro won the Lucie Award for Achievement in Photojournalism. Schapiro’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Museum, the High Museum of Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum, and the Getty Museum.

Steve is survived by his wife Maura Smith, his sons Theophilus Donoghue and Adam Schapiro, and his daughters Elle Harvey and Taylor Schapiro. 

Rest in power.

Art Shay Photography Exhibit Illustrates 1960s Civil Rights Movement

Via The University of Memphis

Art Shay

Martin Luther King speaking at Soldier Field in Chicago during a large "freedom rally" which focused on housing discrimination, 1966

June 20, 2019 - The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis and the Art Museum of the University of Memphis (AMUM) will co-host an opening reception for the exhibit If I Had A Camera - Art Shay: Activism, Civil Rights and Justice Sunday, June 23, at the AMUM from 2-5 p.m.

The exhibition will be open to the media at the opening reception. Media will be permitted to photograph and/or film portions of the exhibit for broadcast purposes.

About the Exhibition

The exhibition, which is open to the public from June 24-Oct. 5, features the photographs of Art Shay (1922-2018), a Chicago-based freelance photographer whose work appeared in Time, Life, Sports Illustrated and many other national publications. In the 1960s, Shay photographed America’s landmark civil rights movement, reflecting a struggle that is not only history but also continues today.

The exhibition includes photographs depicting the 1965 voter registration effort in Fayette County, Tennessee, and the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.

In addition to the series on the civil rights movement, the exhibition includes photographs of celebrities and historical figures such as Robert Kennedy, James Baldwin and Richard Nixon, and historical events such as the protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention.


Regular museum hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.




View Art Shay's photography here.

Gallery Discussion on March 23 in conjunction with 1968 exhibit

Art Shay: Honor King, End Racism, march after assassination of Martin Luther King,  1968

Don E. Carleton: The Press and Photojournalism in 1968

Coincides with exhibition of photographs of historic events of 1968

 

Santa Fe--Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to present a special Gallery discussion with Don E. Carleton: “The Press and Photojournalism in 1968” on Friday, March 23, from 5-7 PM. The talk will start promptly at 5:30 PM in the gallery, seating is limited and is first come, first seated.

The gallery discussion coincides with the exhibition “1968: It Was Fifty Years Ago Today” . The year 1968 marked many changes for the United States. It signaled the end of the Kennedy-Johnson presidencies, the pinnacle of the civil rights movement, the beginning of Women’s rights and Gay rights, and the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam. More than that, it meant a change in public attitudes and beliefs. Photojournalism had a dominating role in the shaping of public attitudes at the time.

One of the consequences of the reporting in Vietnam was to make military leaders determined never to give journalists such free rein; the Nixon Presidency ushered in an era of press secrecy; photographs capturing anti-war protests, chaos outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and of the campaigns and assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy became iconic markers of the year. Dr. Carleton will discuss these topics and explore the importance of news and documentary photography in general as sources for historical research and for giving us a window into the past unequalled by other sources.

Dr. Don Carleton has been executive director of The University of Texas at Austin's Dolph Briscoe Center for American History since its creation in 1991. Dr. Carleton has published and lectured extensively in the fields of historical research, the history of broadcast journalism, and Twentieth Century U.S. political history.

The exhibition continues through April 15, 2018. Gallery hours are 10 to 5 daily. Admission is free. 

STEVE SCHAPIRO: EYEWITNESS CONTINUES THROUGH APRIL 30

Steve Schapiro

On the road, Selma March, 1965

The current exhibition Steve Schapiro: Eyewitness continues through April 30 in the gallery.

The Guardian newspaper featured Schapiro's forthcoming book today in a feature article, link here.

"But before mobile phone videos and Twitter allowed black Americans to directly telegraph their plight to the world, it was up to photojournalism to visualise the message, as Schapiro’s images did in Life magazine."

And the New York Times featured the cover photograph, "CORE Stall In, 1964" from the exhibition announcement in their review of the AIPAD Photography Show last week.

"Steve Schapiro’s astounding “CORE ‘Stall In,’ New York World’s Fair 1964,” at the Monroe Gallery of Photography, which documents a vehicular protest of racism.”

Cassius Clay couldn’t sleep in Miami Beach after beating Sonny Liston there in the legendary 1964 bout

Until recently, Bob Gomel remembered his photograph of Malcolm X and Cassius and Cassius  Clay as " It was February 26, 1964 in a Miami restaurant after Clay won the heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston. Howard Bingham, Ali's personal photographer is seen at the far right above Ali. Clay's brother Rahaman is seated to Cassius's left (only a fist is visible in the famous frame.) The name and exact location of the restaurant are paled into insignificance.” But now the location has been identified.

Via Miami Herald
May 8, 2015


When the rescue of Hampton House began six years ago, vagrants and drug addicts slept in the motel where Malcolm X once stayed. A tree grew out of the swimming pool where Martin Luther King Jr. swam. The walls were crumbling around the courtyard where Ebony magazine had photographed Muhammad Ali and his new wife and baby.

Amid the ruin, there was no hint of Hampton House’s heyday in the 1960s as the premier getaway for black Americans visiting segregated Miami, where beachfront icons like the Fontainebleau were off limits even to celebrities of color.

On Friday, the decay of Hampton House officially lifted as local leaders celebrated a $6 million rehab of the historic 1953 motel — a largely county-funded effort that’s been in the works for about 15 years.

“We got it done,” Miami-Dade Commissioner Audrey Edmonson told a crowd gathered for the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the motel at the corner of Northwest 27th Avenue and 42nd Street.

Facing demolition in 2000, the Hampton House is being relaunched as a community hub, with a museum, space for a restaurant and motel rooms being converted into office space for community groups, recording studios and rehearsal space for musicians.

Organizers hope to revive the Hampton House’s legacy of live entertainment, too. Its jazz club once drew evening crowds from throughout Miami, making Hampton a night-life hub for local African Americans. Traveling celebrities gave it star power.

Segregation meant Miami’s famous crop of luxury oceanfront hotels weren’t available for black people, so Cassius Clay couldn’t sleep in Miami Beach after beating Sonny Liston there in the legendary 1964 bout. The boxer went back to the Hampton House for a bowl of ice cream, and to celebrate with Malcolm X. A month later, Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali.

“This was an oasis in a sea of racism,” Khalilah Camacho Ali said from the Hampton House’s new event space, an open-ceiling hall created out of the old jazz club and some motel rooms above.
On the wall hangs a photo of her leaning over Muhammad Ali as he cradles their infant daughter on a Hampton House pool chair. Ebony took the photo, and included it in a 1969 cover spread featuring the couple.

King stayed at the Hampton House often enough that one ground-floor room came to be known as his suite. A photographer snapped King in swim trunks from the pool. And he is said to have delivered an early version of his “I Have a Dream” speech during an event at Hampton House before it made history on the National Mall in 1963.

Historic Hampton House Motel reopens in Miami

The historic Hampton House Motel in Miami reopened Friday, May 8, 2015, with a ceremony to mark the occasion. The motel was frequented by black celebrities and civil rights activists such as Cassius Clay, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in the middle part of the last century.

A white Jewish couple presided over the Hampton House’s golden years. Harry and Florence Markowitz owned land and apartment buildings in Miami’s Brownsville neighborhood, including what would later become the Hampton House location. In 1954, they leased the land to the Booker Terrace Motel and Apartments.
 

That venture floundered, and the Markowitzes decided to make it a more upscale destination and renamed it the Hampton House after a neigborhood naming contest. They brought in the jazz club to the 50-room motel, started a popular restaurant with late-night fare, and began pursuing black conventions and church groups to boost business. Baseball great Jackie Robinson used Hampton House for a golf tournament he held each year in the Miami area, and the two-story motel marketed itself as the “Social Center of the South.”

The motel closed in the 1970s, and the Markowitzes sold it before the building slipped into disrepair through the 1980s and ’90s. Sons Bob, 74, and Jerry, 66, attended Friday’s ceremony. Bob was asked how his parents would have reacted to seeing Hampton House restored. “I’m getting choked up to even say it,” he replied. “They would be overwhelmed.”

Integration is mostly blamed for the motel’s decline: With black residents and visitors able to frequent beach hotels, the Hampton House lost its edge.



Hampton House had thrived as a gathering spot for local African Americans in the 1960s. At the time, Overtown was fading as the heart of black Miami’s middle class, with more families moving into the new Liberty Square housing complex that sits about 35 blocks from Hampton House.

 

Edmonson, the county commissioner whose district includes the motel, recalls her mother and friends gathering at Hampton House for their regular tea parties. A young Edmonson was occasionally called on for the afternoon’s entertainment, and she was too nervous to look at anyone but her mother while reciting the poem Trees before the ladies decked out in white gloves.

“I remember the Hampton House,” Edmonson told Friday’s crowd assembled on folding chairs in the motel’s parking lot. “I am so proud to say I grew up in this community.”

The Hampton House’s neighborhood in Brownsville now includes some of the poorest stretches of Miami. Miami-Dade wants to raze and rebuild the Liberty Square complex in an effort to root out crime there and revitalize the neighborhood. Census figures from 2010 show Brownsville’s population growing for the first time in 40 years. About 15,000 people live there.

Hampton House organizers hope there will be enough interest in the area that they can generate revenue by renting out the old coffee shop as a restaurant. It’s been restored with a new version of the original mural from somewhere in the Caribbean, and yellow-vinyl stools along the lunch counter. It was the site of perhaps the most famous photo ever taken at Hampton House: Malcolm X, having gotten himself behind the counter, snapping his own photo of Clay after his victory against Liston.

For Enid Pinkney, founding president of the Historic Hampton House Community Trust and long-time champion of the restoration effort, the building’s return offers another chance to link prosperity with Hampton House.

“We’ll have a place in Miami,” she said in a trust video released last year, “where we can go and be proud of the effort that went into bringing that back as an economic engine in the community.”

This article was updated to correct the distance between the Liberty Square housing complex and Hampton House.

 

Mixing Metaphors: The Aesthetic, the Social and the Political in African American Art

Via The Tampa Bay Newspapers
October 1, 2013


 Mixing Metaphors: The Aesthetic, the Social and the Political in African American Art from the Bank of America Collection is the largest exhibition of African American art ever presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.

More than 90 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and mixed-media works by 36 accomplished artists will be on view from Saturday, Oct. 5 to Sunday, Jan. 5, 2014.

"Photographers and TV cameramen brought the Civil Rights Movement into our homes, mobilizing action and change. Memphis-based Ernest C. Withers was called “the official photographer of the Civil Rights Movement.” Six images from his famous I Am A Man portfolio document pivotal moments in the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the struggle as a whole. They are especially moving as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream’” speech."

More here.



Related Exhibition: Ernest C. Withers: A Life's Work

1963

 Charles Moore, Fire Hoses Aimed at Demonstrators, Birmingham, 1963,

Gewlatin silver print, 11” x 14”

THE Magazine
June, 2013

The very time I thought I was lost/
My dungeon shook and my chains fell off
—African-American spiritual


 

In the preface to his 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, a poetic exploration of race and religion in the United States, James Baldwin made an important, if paradoxical proclamation: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” More than half a century after thethirty-one-year-old African-American writer released his book to a shifting American public, civil rights issues are still a vast and clumsy national topic.

Monroe Gallery’s current show of black and-white photographs is titled, simply enough, 1963, and covers that tumultuous year in American history with empathy and remarkable beauty. While human-rights concerns were gaining visibility in many parts of the country, changes must have felt imperceptible in many others, and the exhibition does a great job of visually encapsulating this disparity. Entering the space, one first sees photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr.—fitting enough, considering he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. An image of this iconic moment shows King at a podium, surrounded by listeners. Nearby,the picture Fire Hoses Aimed at Demonstrators, Birmingham, 1963, depicts three people being blasted with water from an unseen fireman during a protest in Alabama. The image is jarringly visceral and utterly captivating. In President John F. Kennedy Visiting Berlin, 1963, we see a gaggle of admirers clamoring around the figure of the president in a black car. JFK’sassassination would take place just five months later, a knowledge that, for the viewer, imbues the scene with an incredible poignancy. In a nearby photo, a barefoot Jackie Kennedy walks along the Palm Beach shoreline with her little son.

Undoubtedly, for most of us the show is a powerful history lesson. James Meredith, the first African-American to graduate from the infamously segregated University of Mississippi, is pictured surrounded by U.S. Marshals but his face retains a calm poise. A sobering handful of images memorialize the funeral of Medgar Evers, a pioneering and vocal advocate for African-American rights, who was shot and killed by a Ku Klux Klansman who wasn’t initially convicted of the crime. For the most part, the other half of the gallery space displays work that’s less politically and emotionally charged. A particularly lovely composition shows Steve McQueen and his wife relaxing in a hot tub, cigarettes and wine goblets in hand. The next photograph shows the be-sunglassed actor sitting on a sofa, holding a pistol. Next to this is a four-paneled composition of Sean Connery, posing with a sly grin and a gun. An image of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and a handful of photos of athletes like Arnold Palmer and Sandy Koufax round out this part of the show. These shots are no doubt meant to inject a little levity, but I thought the placement of images that either depict violence or else strongly suggest it, coupled with Hollywoodstyle showiness and triumphant moments in sports history, made for an incompatible and somewhat unpalatable juxtaposition.

In 1963, ten years after he spoke of his conflicted relationship with America, James Baldwin penned a letter to his teenage nephew, elaborating on what he called “my dispute with my country.” In it, he warns the boy that though people know better than to behave out of fear and hate, they often “find it very difficult to act on what they know.… To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger.” Fifty years after this letter was written, it can still be said that the politicians who ostensibly represent us are afraid to be committed to a strong position when it comes to making decisions on issues like gun control and same-sex marriage. There’s a potentially squirmy reaction from photography lovers who walk into Monroe Gallery and expect foggy landscapes and nudes, and that’s one of the reasons 1963 is such an admirably courageous little exhibition. More than a show, this grouping of photographs is really a meditation on an era that isn’t completely in America’s rearview mirror. In 2013, being an American and loving America can feel downright paradoxical, and though we can’t always make amends for the wrongs committed by our nation in her past, the work in this show seems to quietly remind us that through learning and remembering, we can pave the way for a kinder future.

—Iris McLister

 

 

Newseum opens exhibit featuring Martin Luther King Birmingham, Alabama jail cell door

A casting of the original jail cell door behind which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was confined after his April 1963 arrest for leading non-violent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, is seen at the Newseum in Washington on February 1, 2013. To celebrate the beginning of Black History Month, the Newseum opened "Jailed in Birmingham," a new exhibit featuring the casting of the original jail cell door. It was in this cell that the civil rights leader penned his historic letter defending civil disobedience. The "Letter From Birmingham Jail," written in response to a statement by a group of eight white Alabama clergymen, includes the now famous quote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." AFP PHOTO/Nicholas KAMM

 

Via artdaily.org

WASHINGTON, DC.- To celebrate the beginning of Black History Month, today the Newseum opens "Jailed in Birmingham," a new exhibit featuring a casting of the original jail cell door behind which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was confined after his April 1963 arrest for leading nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Ala. It was in this cell that the civil rights leader penned his historic letter defending civil disobedience. The "Letter From Birmingham Jail," written in response to a statement by a group of eight white Alabama clergymen, includes the now-famous quote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

The door on display is a bronze casting made from the original door to King's cell in the Birmingham city jail. The exhibit also features one of the first publications of the letter, a 1963 pamphlet published by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group. The exhibit is on display in the Newseum's News Corporation News History Gallery.

On Saturday, Feb. 2, at 2:30 p.m., Chris Jenkins, editor of The RootDC, and award-winning video journalist Garrett Hubbard will discuss King's legacy during a special Inside Media program. The two collaborated on a Washington Post video series, "BrotherSpeak," which explores the experiences of black men in America. Inside Media programs are free with paid admission to the Newseum, and seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

This year will mark a number of milestone anniversaries of key events in U.S. history, and the Newseum will debut new exhibits to highlight them. From March 1 to 14, a special, free exhibit will illustrate the landmark 1913 women's suffrage parade on Pennsylvania Avenue through newspaper front pages and photos of the historic event. "Marching for Women's Rights" will be on view to the public in front of the Newseum in the museum's Today's Front Pages cases.

Later this year, the Newseum will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with two new exhibits and an original documentary chronicling the presidency, family life and death of America's 35th president. The Newseum will host public programs and special events about the Kennedys throughout 2013 to enhance the visitor experience. The JFK exhibits and film will be on display April 12, 2013, through Jan. 5, 2014.

 

 

Related: "1963" exhibition at Monroe Gallery of Photography, April 12 - June 23, 2013

Inaguration Day (to Night)

 © Stephen Wilkes Instagram "This will be my view for the Presidential Inauguration"

Today is a rare combination of the Presidential Inauguration and Martin Luther King Day. If you are attending the inauguration ceremonies, or watching them on tv, look for Stephen Wilkes on the platform between CBS and CNN as he creates an Inaugural "Day To Night" photograph.

Meanwhile, visitors to the final day of photo la 2013 are invited to view significant examples of 20th and 21st Century photojournalism at Monroe Gallery of Photography. The Gallery is exhibiting photographs spanning more than 85 years of history, including iconic civil rights images; Bill Eppridge's photographs of Robert F. Kennedy and The Beatles; work by Nina Berman, Yuri Kozyrev, and Stephen Wilkes Seaside Heights photograph after  Hurricane Sandy .

Photojournalist Steve Schapiro's Contrasting Life

Steve Schapiro: Martin Luther King Marching for Voting Rights with John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Douglas, James Forman and Ralph Abernathy, Selma, 1965


Via CNN

December 12, 2012

Photographer Steve Schapiro's five decade career of classic photos displayed in new book, ‘Then and Now’

During his five-decade career, photographer Steve Schapiro likes to say he has photographed everything from presidents to poodles. Schapiro has captured the special moments of rock stars, film stars and politicians of the 60's and '70's as well as photos of migrant workers and the Selma March with Martin Luther King. In his new photobook "Then and Now" Schapiro compiles some of his best and most iconic images. The book contains more than 170 photos – some of which have never been published before. He joins “Stating Point” this morning to discuss some of his most iconic photos and his new book.

Video link here.
 

Schapiro says it has always interested him, “to capture all the different elements that make up our country.” He tells the story behind him capturing an iconic photo of Actor Marlon Brando when he was hired to photograph “The Godfather.” Schapiro says, “Brando let me photograph his makeup session… and in the middle of it he just gave me this wonderful look which luckily I caught.” Reminiscing on a picture he took of Actor Dustin Hoffman leaping in a narrow hallway he says, “[Dustin] is a delight. He is a delight on and off camera. He just has such spirit and you know such wonderful feeling and humor all the time…This was just a moment after they had been feeling and it just was a spontaneous event.”

Schapiro admits that he always wanted to be a “Life Magazine” photographer and “one of the things that interested [him] was the migrant worker situation in America.” He talks about his very first story where he spent four weeks documenting the lives of the migrant workers through his photos and an essay and reflects on one particular photo of a cabin wall where a child once wrote “I love anybody who loves me".

Steve Schapiro Talks Photography: Then and Now

Steve Schapiro: Martin Luther King, Alabama, 1965

Via Women's wear Daily

By Susan Stone
November 26, 2012


“I still haven’t done my best photograph, in my mind, at this point. I’m still looking for a photograph which I really feel has lasting quality,” insisted Schapiro, sitting down for a chat at Berlin’s CWC Gallery, the city’s newest outpost of Camera Work. Surrounded by glass-framed photos from his long and varied career — a Factory party with Edie, Andy and the gang, Muhammad Ali shirtless and playing Monopoly, Barbra Streisand in perfect profile — he paged through his latest book “Then and Now,” published by Hatje Cantz.

The book, which recently launched in Germany and is scheduled for a Friday release in the U.S., includes many never-before-seen images from Schapiro’s archives of journalistic work, celebrity portraits and movie-set shoots, as well as some of his recent forays into digital photography. The 50 years’ worth of pictures reveal incredible access and intimate insights.

As a freelance photojournalist in the Sixties, Shapiro worked for the magazines Life and Look, and later shot the first cover for People. His photos hang in the halls of the Smithsonian and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and feature in countless private collections and galleries, as well as several books. Many of his pictures are powered by that undefinable, invaluable quality that propels so many notables to the top — charisma. Schapiro says it’s not always evident at first glance, citing a shoot with a famous top model as an example.

“We were going to photograph her, and we’re in the Grand Canyon, and we’re driving to it. And she’s, like, incredibly famous. And I’m looking in the [rearview] mirror and I’m saying, ‘This is isn’t going to work at all,’” he says, recalling a shoot with Christie Brinkley. “And the moment we started shooting, it was perfect. So you can’t always tell.”

What is evident is that his images also have a cinematic quality, so he was a natural to take behind-the-scenes portraits on some of the great films, including “Taxi Driver,” “Midnight Cowboy” and “The Godfather.” But whether on the streets or film shoots, he says he wasn’t always aware of when he had a hit in his lens, or that his mountains of daily work would end up as collectibles.

“Basically, this little guy took all these pictures, and now I have them. This little guy was a workaholic, which was great. Because he left me all this stuff,” laughs Schapiro.

The once brightly colored but now fading orange band on Schapiro’s wrist proves that the little guy is still working hard. It’s from the Beloved sacred art and music festival in Oregon, one of the venues he’s visited for his current book project called “Bliss.” Together with his son, who is keenly spiritual, Schapiro is making the rounds of such events internationally, camping in tents and snapping participants reveling in the music and community, for the work in progress. This veteran of several youthquakes says there’s something missing in the current generation of seekers compared with those of the Sixties. “You were very much aware of what was happening in the world. And I would say that in terms of this grouping, there’s less interest in the outside world entirely,” he muses, noting a lack of interest in politics as well.

Go to slideshow

For a man known for his poignant photos of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy, politics are still important, but politicians of today hold little appeal, nor do contemporary celebrities whose schedules and speech are highly controlled by publicists, Schapiro says. Once, he spent days or even weeks with his subjects, building relationships that developed into great photos. Now, he says, “if it’s not a cover, you probably spend two hours, and people have to keep changing their clothes every 15 minutes so that it looks in print as if you’ve been with them a long period of time. And you have usually a handler sitting there saying, ‘Oh no, wait a minute, I have to fix your hair — no you can’t put a cigarette — no cigarettes,’” he says, dropping his voice into an intent whisper to imitate the commentary of an intent p.r. agent.

Turning to review the famous faces he’s captured and the moments he’s frozen forever in black and white, he says he can’t really explain what makes a photograph have lasting power. It could be an emotional quality or an intuitive feeling or immaculate design. “Certain pictures get better with time.”


Related:  Steve Schapiro, Then and Now: Rare Images from a Photography Legend

Steve Schapiro, Then and Now: Rare Images from a Photography Legend

Steve Schapiro

left: Selma Marchers On the Road, 1965, right: Martin Luther King Jr., Selma March 1965

"Those who joined the Selma March could hold the flag high. It was a long symbolic walk and the possibility of violence was always there. Dr. King, the symbol of the non-violent revolution seemed to scour the crowds with a portent of what might follow."

Via Time LightBox
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
By Feifei Sun | @feifei_sun


Just the list of people Steve Schapiro has photographed during his career reads like a Who’s Who of the most influential politicians, celebrities and newsmakers in American history over the last five decades. But that Schapiro captured his subjects during their pivotal and seminal moments—Robert F. Kennedy during his 1968 presidential campaign; Marlon Brando on the set of The Godfather; Andy Warhol and muse Edie Sedgwick in The Factory, among others—lends his photographs an added significance. They aren’t just remarkable portraits of remarkable people, but snapshots into our country’s historical and cultural milestones.

Schapiro’s output over his more than 50-year career has been prolific, and many people have probably seen one of his photographs whether they realize it or not. But his new book, Then and Now, gives readers a look at Schapiro’s lesser-known work; the majority of pictures has never been published. “There were so many pictures that I loved but didn’t fit with the format of my previous books, so this was a chance to bring forth that work,” he says. The book is comprised of single images shown over a spread, as well as spreads of disparate images that share a composition or theme—one such example has a portrait of Martin Scorcese holding a gun and grapes on the left page, and a portrat of Mia Farrow holding a baby on the right. “I wanted to make a book that was interesting on every page,” says Schapiro. “That evolved into the idea of working with double pages where one picture worked with another.”

Schapiro first took an interest to photography at 9 while at summer camp. He fell in love with “the magic of photography” in the dark room, where he became fascinated by how pictures came to life after being dipped in various formulas. But it wasn’t until he discovered Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, as a teenager, that his interest really took hold. He began trying to capture his own decisive moments on the streets of New York City, before going to study the formal aspects of photography under W. Eugene Smith.

In 1961, amid the height of the Civil Rights movement, Schapiro started working as a freelance photographer for publications such as LIFE, Rolling Stone, TIME and Newsweek. Over the next 10 years, which Schapiro calls “the golden age of photojournalism,” he would cover the decade’s most significant events, including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 march in Selma, and later, King’s abandoned motel room after this assassination, as well as the “Summer of Love” in Haight-Asbury and Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. “It was an incredible time to be a photojournalist because there was more of an emotional flow—an ability to do more emotional pictures that captured the spirit of a person,” says Schapiro of the period. “I was able to spend a lot of time with people—Bobby Kennedy went to South America for four weeks and I got to go with him. When I got really sick there, Ethel Kennedy brought me Bobby’s pajamas to wear. Bobby was someone who I became friends with, but everyone who worked with him loved him.”

Despite his success as a photographer, Schapiro maintains that he hasn’t taken his most important picture yet—and doesn’t have any idea what it might be. In the meantime, there’s one subject who continues to elude him: “President Barack Obama. I would love to photograph him.”

Slideshow here.