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Steve Schapiro: American Edge

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Visual images from Steve Schapiro, documenting the 60's of America. You can find how the photographer captured the places, the people during the turbulent decade, and how the people projected out from the inner side of the faces. Contrasting and contradicting images provides the space for you to look deeper into the surface of the images.

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.

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

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.

It's rare to find a book with the depth and breadth of American Edge. Steve Schapiro has managed to do the impossible -- capture some of the most significant moments and people of our times in stunning and fresh new perspectives. Not only does Schapiro have a discerning eye but he also had access to people and places that few others did. The combination makes for a truly impressive collection of photographs that brilliantly conveys the fading innocence, raw emotion and turmoil of the times.

It is hard to think of a decade in the history of America which offered more hope, changes and excitments. And it is hard to believe that one person managed to have been able to photograph its most memorable moments and its most iconic individuals. Talk about being at the right place at the right time. His pictures managed to be of the moment and timeless in their beauty and simplicity.

And not only is this yarn giddy, it's sturdy, too. Shapiro chronicles an age, not just of soon-too-be-lost innocence, but of great strength and determination. Charming, iconoclastic, and deeply humanistic, these pictures are in essence the scrapbook of a nation -- America! And here she is in all her gritty, "edge-y" glory!