Steve Schapiro: American Edge

Rating:
Summary: american images
Review: a most beautiful book of balck and white images of americans. this book looks and feels like a collector's item. a great coffee table book

Rating:
Summary: Steve Schapiro: American Edge
Review: American Edge brings today's maturing baby boomers back to a clear turning point in their lives. Life was being challenged and changed, all about them...and many took the turmoil for granted, as just another, ho-hum, happening. Schapiro's lens puts us there, side-by-side with people we've only imagined knowing--and now, eyeball-to-eyeball, we are stepping back into their lives, and ours. It's a trip worth taking, and showing the grandkids, too.

Rating:
Summary: steve schapiro
Review: As a young photographer, working out of New York during the 1960s, covering the mass cultural transformation sweeping the country. We'd bump into each other at places like Andy Warhol's Factory, or on a college campus during one form of civil disturbance or another. He was a LIFE photographer and his name was Steve Schapiro.Steve was a disciple of W. Eugene Smith, and shared Smith's passion for black and white documentary work. He had already set a mission for himself, to chronicle the "icons" of American Life. He traveled from coast to coast, from migrant farms in Arkansas, to Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco. He covered the civil rights struggles and got to know the people who would shape a generation, and who were considered among the most dynamic of this past century.

As you go through the pages of "American Edge," you're conscious of the fact that these icons still stand out as defining figures forty years later. The Kennedys, the Rolling Stones, Martin Luther King Jr., and Andy Warhol, to name but a few. In contrast, Steve feels that we are now going through, as he calls it, a "period of American valium."

In Schapiro's moment, every picture contained pictures and every person was a picture too, pre-costumed, posed and they're to be taken. Look at his celebrity portraits of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, of Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, of Magritte doubling his own image, and Warhol mimicking the pose of his own self-portraits. Shapiro takes their pictures, but he also captures the cool opacity of creatures who understood that history had become pictures and that pictures became history. Everything and everyone self-evidently meant something, so people wore words as well as thinking them and speaking them. They bore their convictions on their sleeves, wrote them on walls, carried them as signs, painted them on their faces, stitched them to their hats, clipped them to their lips, aspiring to become those words incarnate.