Steve Schapiro was born in New York in 1934. He discovered photography at the age of nine while vacationing at a summer camp. Inspired by the camera’s capabilities, Schapiro spent decades strolling the streets of New York trying to imitate the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who admired him. He soon began to study photography with the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, who, like Bresson, had a tremendous influence on Shapiro. In 1961, Shapiro’s photographs began appearing in publications such as LIFE, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Time, Sports Illustrated, People, and Paris Match.
Schapiro joined many names that have gone down in history as representatives of humanistic photography. His interest in social subjects, his sensitive approach to models, is mostly the result of work under the hands of Smith. During the 1960s in America, often referred to as the «golden age of photojournalism,» his photographic series focused on Easter in Harlem, the Apollo Theater, Haight Ashbury, political protests, the drug problem, and the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign. With the same interest, he took pictures of both presidents and dogs. He owns portraits of such iconic figures as Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Ray Charles, Jacqueline Kennedy, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Barbara Streisand and Truman Capote. Especially famous was a series of works with new «American heroes» ─ Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, a friend of Schapiro.
Steve Schapiro’s photographs have been published in numerous magazines and books on American culture in the 1960s. His work is in many private and public collections, notably the Smithsonian Museum, High Museum of Art, New York Metropolitan Museum and Getty Museum. Major retrospective exhibitions of the author were held in the USA, Spain, Russia and Germany.
