Fighting For Rights

In his 55-year career, Steve Schapiro has witnessed many key events in modern US history, and made some of the most enduring images of the civil rights movement. Steve Fairclough finds out more

- Steve Fairclough

Steve Schapiro picked up his first camera when he was nine years old. It was a 127 Kodak, and he was at summer camp. However, what influenced his career most was Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment. He explains, ‘I would go out and try to photograph that way – capturing the exact moment that was the height of action or emotion.’

From these beginnings, Steve went on to study with the legendary US photojournalist W Eugene Smith. He recalls, ‘I stayed with Eugene Smith in 1961 and he really taught you how to make prints in terms of getting intense blacks and intense whites. Sometimes he used up to 250 sheets of paper to make one master print.’

Printing wasn’t the only thing he mastered from working with Eugene Smith. ‘I also learned a feeling for humanity from him, as well as tricks of the trade – for example, a picture works best if there are two points of interest in it. So it won’t be just a portrait of someone – there will be something else that reveals more about them, and your eye will go back and forth between the two. It becomes a more satisfying experience and you stay with the photograph longer.’

Unsurprisingly, given his tutelage under a photographer such as Eugene Smith, Steve developed an ongoing interest in journalistic photography. He reveals, ‘As I was growing up, the most important magazine you could be a photographer for was Life. I did my own projects – I went to Arkansas on my own and did a story on migrant workers there.’ That story was picked up and published, without a fee, by a small Catholic magazine called Jubilee and subsequently The New York Times Magazine.