Steve Shapiro: Sixties icons depicting a time of change in the United States

Steve Schapiro: The Whisper I, Marlon Brando in "The Godfather"

Steve Schapiro 16 March - 27 May 2012
Swedish Museum of Photography ( Fotografiska)

                   

The American photographer Steve Schapiro was present during the political and cultural changes in the US in the 1960s. As a young photojournalist, Schapiro received commissions for Life magazine, which, among other things, included following Martin Luther King until the day he was murdered. Schapiro played Monopoly with the then unknown boxer Muhammad Ali and hung out with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground in The Factory in Manhattan. At the time, Schapiro had no inkling that his photographs depicted people who were to become some of the icons of the Sixties. In his unique images, Schapiro captured the character and charisma of his subjects. He calls his series of photographs of the icons of the Sixties Heroes, a photojournalistic term denoting the picture chosen by a picture editor for a cover of a magazine. In the exhibition, the Sixties icons are presented side by side, depicting a time of change in the United States.

Steve Schapiro’s perhaps best known pictorial series include his unique stills from the classic movies The Godfather (1972) and Taxi Driver (1976). In the 1970s, Schapiro was hired to take exclusive photographs during the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s and Martin Scorsese’s archetypal movies. As a still photographer, Schapiro depicted the shoots from unique angles and his photographs portray the drama, the scenes and the actors, all at the same time. The photographs capture and freeze classic film scenes, such as the whisper into Marlon Brando’s ear, the kiss with Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, gun in hand, talking to his reflection in the mirror, and a young Jodie Foster walking the streets of New York. The photographs balance between fiction and reality and are today regarded as legendary in film history.

Steve Schapiro (b. 1934 in Brooklyn) began taking photographs at the age of ten. Trained by the renowned photojournalist W Eugene Smith, Schapiro received commissions for magazines such as Life, Time, Rolling Stone, People and Newsweek. Schapiro has worked on over 200 feature films, including TheGodfather, Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy, and has exhibited widely internationally and now lives in Chicago.

Stan Stearns dies; captured immortal image at JFK’s funeral

John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin, November 25, 1963 with Ted Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Rose Kennedy, Peter Lawford, and

 Robert F. Kennedy in background  Stan Stearns/UPI

We are terribly sadddend by the passing of our friend Stan Stearns.

 It’s so iconic the rights to publish and use it have been resold twice for millions of dollars.“Stan wound up with $25."

The Washington Post

By Adam Bernstein
Published: March 2

“One exposure on a roll of 36 exposures,” Stan Stearns marveled decades later. The young news photographer, in one instinctive click, captured one of the most poignant and reproduced images of the past half-century: little John F. Kennedy Jr., grief-stricken, saluting his father’s coffin as it rolled by on a caisson.

Mr. Stearns died of cancer March 2 at the Mandrin care facility in Harwood, said his niece, Karla Bowles. He was 76 and had spent the past four decades running a photography studio in his native Annapolis.

His most enduring contribution to photography indisputably came on the chilly morning of Nov. 25, 1963, when he covered the funeral procession of the President John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Stearns was working in Washington for the United Press International wire service when Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Outside Washington’s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, where the president was celebrated and mourned a few days later, Mr. Stearns was jammed with 70 other photojournalists into a roped-off space meant for perhaps half as many.

As Kennedy’s caisson rolled by, Mr. Stearns trained his telephoto lens on first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who was veiled in black. When she bent down to whisper in her son’s ear, Mr. Stearns clicked as 3-year-old John Jr.’s right hand snapped into a salute. The boy was dressed in a blue dress coat and short pants. It was also his birthday.

“As the caisson was rolling out to Arlington Cemetery,” Mr. Stearns later recalled, “I asked every photographer I could if they had the salute. Duh! Nobody saw it. Everyone I talked to had been concentrating on Jackie and the caisson.”

He returned to the office, satisfied that he had the best picture of the day.

“The bureau chief almost had a hemorrhage,” Mr. Stearns told the Annapolis Capital in 2009. “I never saw a man turn as white as he did because I was not with the entourage going to Arlington. Then the big boss from New York overheard that and he said, ‘You better have it or you’re fired on the spot.’ ”

He had it.

The picture made the front pages of newspapers worldwide and was printed in mass-circulation magazines such as Life. The image came to define the emotion of the event in a way words may not have had the power to convey.

Just the mention of the salute can still revive memories for those who lived through that day. It remains one of perhaps a handful of pictures that evoke the span of the mid-20th century: Joe Rosenthal’s image of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II, Eddie Adams’s photo of a South Vietnamese general’s street-side execution of a suspected Viet Cong, Nick Ut’s picture of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack.

Mr. Stearns’s picture still resonates so completely because it speaks to the “trope of the brave little soldier that existed in American visual culture,” said Alison Nordstrom, a senior photography curator at the George Eastman House, a photography museum in Rochester, N.Y.

Nordstrom said the Kennedys so fascinated the public because they were a young, photogenic family and so vibrant in the wake of the Eisenhower years. Familiar images of the Kennedy children — John Jr. hiding under his father’s desk, the president’s daughter Caroline with a pony — crystallized the way the public knew and identified with the family.

Mr. Stearns’s image of the salute brought it all together, Nordstrom said, “a combination of familiar tropes and familiar sentiments with figures who felt known to us.”

In 1999, John Kennedy Jr. was presumed dead after a small airplane he was piloting went missing. He was 38. Mr. Stearns’s picture was again summoned to remind readers and viewers of what the former first son had once represented.

“I felt a strong connection to him,” Mr. Stearns told the Baltimore Sun in 1999. “Covering the White House during the Kennedy years, I had a son just two years younger than John-John.”

Stanley Frank Stearns was born May 11, 1935, in Annapolis, where his parents owned a jewelry shop. His interest was jazz drumming until a relative gave him a Brownie Flash Six-20 camera for his bar mitzvah. He attended Annapolis High School and, at 16, began working as a photographer for the Capital newspaper.

He was an Air Force photographer from 1954 to 1958, taking pictures for military publications in Japan, and then joined UPI in a position he later described as “one step above floor sweeper.”

Mr. Stearns left the wire service in the early 1970s to start a photography studio in Annapolis. He continued working until his death. His niece described him as “cantankerous and very meticulous.”

His marriage to Maxine Skwersky ended in divorce. Survivors include a son, commercial photographer Jay Stearns of Annapolis; a brother; and four grandchildren.
News and government photographers periodically made claims to the famed image of the salute. All were discredited, but the compensation was entirely in glory, Mr. Stearns wryly noted.

“I got $25 for winning picture of the month” at UPI, he told the Sun. “That and my regular paycheck. It’s frustrating when I think of how much money that picture has made in the last 30 years. Probably $3 million to $5 million.”

UPI - Stan Stearns, 76, who took the photo of little John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s coffin, died March 2.

The New York Times: Stan Stearns, Photographer of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s Salute to Father, Dies at 76

What if a World Press Photo of The Year was taken in America?

“But it does say something about what you can do in your own backyard.” --Craig Walker

John Maloof: "I had absolutely no interest in photography as an art form before I found Maier's work. She sparked my obsession in photography."

Vivian Maier: Self Portrait, February 1955

 © 2012 Maloof Collection, Ltd

We start everyday reading la lettre de la Photographie. Today we discovered a comprehensive interviw with John Maloof, "the man behind Vivian Maier".

"In 2007, while seeking material for an unrelated project, John Maloof happened upon the photographic oeuvre of Vivian Maier at auction. Said Chicago auction house had acquired 10,000 rolls of her film, 20-30,000 of which were undeveloped, amongst other belongings from Maier’s neglected storage locker. Maloof’s intriguing photographic purchase would morph, unwittingly, into the kind of pivotal discovery that’s the stuff of Ali Baba’s cave: an unearthing of bounty completely undiscovered by the rest of the world.

Having no prior photography background, John Maloof was nonetheless captivated by the images he bought, to the point that it inspired him to test out street photography for himself. He stated on his blog that, when he walked the same Chicago streets that Vivian Maier had, and tried to capture what she had been able to, he “realize[d] how difficult it was to make images of her caliber.” With this realization, Maloof put Vivian Maier’s work online in order to contextualize the images within a more knowledgeable photography community. Though his impetus for making her work public was an amateur’s curiosity, the fervent reactions to Maier’s black and white photographs brought forth a tide of spellbound fans riveted by these images. Maier’s street scenes depict those authentic moments when people unsuspectingly let their guard down, and even her frontal portraits have a feeling of reveal. The subjects range from playful children to dozing elders, hardscrabble drifters to primly elegant ladies, listless young men to toiling workers: all collective participants in the rhythm of the American metropolitan landscape. " Full interview and slide show here.


Related:    Vivian Maier: Discovered

                  View the exhibition, through April 22, 2012


About La Lettre de la Photographie

Freedom of the Press? Or Espionage?

Via The New York Times:


"America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business."

"Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that the administration had lauded brave reporting in distant lands more than once and then asked, “How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistle-blowers to court?”

He then suggested that the administration seemed to believe that “the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here.”

Related: Freedom of the Press

ACADEMY AWARDS

Alan Grant: Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly backstage at the 28th Annual Academy Awards, March 21, 1956.

Neither Grace Kelly nor Audrey Hepburn were nominees at the event in RKO Pantages Theatre. Grace Kelly presented Best Actor Oscar to Ernest Borgnine for Marty, and Audrey Hepburn presented the Best Picture to the same film. That year, Anna Magnani won the best actress award for The Rose Tattoo, and Jo Van Fleet won the award for best supporting actress for East of Eden.

Allan Grant (1919-2008) was a Life magazine photographer–the last photographer to photographer Marilyn Monroe before she died on August 5, 1962, and the first to photograph Marina Oswald after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Related: Making Movies

NEW YORK PRESS PHOTOGRAPHERS ASSOCIATION YEAR IN PICTURES 2012

The NYPPA has just posted the winning images (in no particular order) and will announce the Winning images and their order at a dinner that is tentatively scheduled for May 31st 2012.

Full list here.

The NYPPA YEAR IN PICTURES 2012 were judged by 3 extraordinary judges:

Melanie Burford, Bill Eppridge , and David Burnett

Judges Bill Eppridge, Melanie Burford & David Burnett discuss the images
Photo via NYPPA

Readers of this blog will be familiar with Bill Eppridge. After his graduation from college, Eppridge worked for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and then went on to work for LIFE. During the 1960s and until the magazine folded in 1972 Eppridge was a staff photographer for LIFE. He covered many topics and news events, often finding himself in history-making situations.While working for LIFE, Eppridge photographed celebrities such as Alan Alda on the set of M*A*S*H, Gene Hackman, Raquel Welch and others. During the Apollo 13 mission, Epperidge was the only photographer allowed into Marilyn Lovell’s home even as her husband was stranded in orbit above the moon. In 1968 while five feet in front of his subject and friend, Robert F. Kennedy lay on the floor of the kitchen of Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel, mortally wounded by a bullet fired by Sirhan B. Sirhan. Eppridge went into the crowd and began holding people back, but every once in a while, he would reach down and click his camera.

Bill Eppridge looks at the images

Photo via NYPPA

This last week, Bill's photographs of 1960's skateboarders went viral on the internet. Bill recalls that he photographed skateboarders in Central Park during a competition and kids on the streets in NYC. He says that there were lots of skateboarders around then, and despite what some blogs claim, he never "handed out" skateboards.  Some of the photos that were included were actually shot at Weslyan University in Middletown, CT, aloso at a skateboarding competition.

A special selection of Bill Eppridge's photographs will be on exhibit during the AIPAD Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, March 28 - April 1. Visit Monroe Gallery, Booth #419.

Tributes for Remi Ochlik

Rebel forces fight Muammar Gaddafi's troops on a road outside

Ras Lanouf, Libya, March 2011

©Remi Ochlik/Bureau233/Eyevine

The US-born Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik have been killed after shelling hit a safe house for journalists in the Syrian city of Homs.



Remi Ochlik Website


TIME Light Box: In Memoriam: Rémi Ochlik, 1983 – 2012



NYT Lens: Parting Glance: Rémi Ochlik


MSNBC Photo Blog: The work of photographer Remi Ochlik, killed in Syria


The Guardian: Remi Ochlik's photojournalism - a collection


    Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin's last report from Syria – video


Telegraph: Remi Ochlik: the French photographer killed alongside Marie Colvin


Washington Post: Award-winning photojournalist Remi Ochlik, 28, killed at work in violence-wracked Syria


Reuters: U.S., French journalists killed in Syria


Gigaom: Syrian live streamer killed after being watched by millions


Committee To Protect Journalists: 899 Journalists Killed since 1992

Another Day, Another Photograper Arrested, and Photographer Rights Lens Cloths

Via pixiq

"As I prepare my legal battle against the Miami-Dade Police Department for falsely arresting me and for deleting my footage, I am seeking new ways to raise money for my legal defense fund.

I recently entered into a business venture with Keith Robertson, a Vancouver man who runs Zap Rag, a company that sells lens cloths and laminated cards with photo laws printed on them.

The items are designed to be used by photographers when they get harassed by cops or security guards for shooting in public."

Elsewhere: "Today, the NPPA sent another letter of protest to U.S. Parks Police Chief Teresa Chambers asking her to investigate allegations that a photographer was arrested and detained for 48 hours without being formally charged." Full post here.

Related: Your street photography rights on a lens cloth
              Freedom of the Press?

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer

Via Digital Photography Review

By Barney Britton
| Published Feb 19, 2012 | Book Reviews

"Vivian Maier is one of those exceptionally rare things - an artist without a biography. She can’t tell us why she took these photographs, or explain what or who she was influenced by so it’s up to us to decide, if we want to. All we have to go on is the images she left behind. As such, Maier is a gift to critics, who I have no doubt will busy themselves defining her 'value' and what her work 'means' for quite some time to come. My advice is to find this book in your local bookshop, and spend an hour or so leafing through it. 'Street Photographer' is an exhilarating collection and a welcome reminder that greatness and fame are two very different things."

Vivian Maier: Discovered on exhibit through April 22, 2012.