Steve Schapiro

Born in 1936, Steve Schapiro documented many of the pivotal events and prominent figures of the turbulent 1960s—the Selma bus boycott, Bobby Kennedy's Presidential campaign, James Baldwin's tour of the American South, the street scene of Haight Ashbury, Mohammed Ali's rise to fame, and the superstars of Andy Warhol's Factory. In August 2000 he published the book American Edge, a collection of his black and white photographs from the 1960s which many have likened to Robert Frank's The Americans.

In the 1970s and 1980s he continued his documentary work but also worked on Hollywood movie posters for such films as Midnight Cowboy and The Godfather. Today, Schapiro is active in developing on-line portfolios about topics such as Vietnam vets, drug trafficking in American , and racism in the prison system, for American Radio Works, a division of Minneapolis Public Radio.

His photographs have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "Visa Pour L’Image" Festival in Perpignan, France, and are included in the Smithsonian Museum’s collection. He is represented by Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.

Steve Schapiro's work is represented in Ryerson’s Black Star Historical Black & White Photography Collection, an internationally-renowned collection of almost 300,000 black and white photographs produced between 1930 and 1980 by some of North America’s most influential photographers. This remarkable visual legacy of the 20th century was donated to Ryerson University in 2005. Founded in New York in 1935, The Black Star photographic agency has played a key role in the emergence of photojournalism as we know it today.