Sam Shaw (1912 – 1999)

www.shawfamilyarchives.com
contact: info@shawfamilyarchives.net

Sam Shaw, a lifelong New Yorker, was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Shaw is internationally recognized for his photographs of films and movie stars, though his interests and talents covered a wide array of subjects including music, theater, sculpture, painting, literature, journalism, as well as social and political activism. Shaw’s prolific six-decade career is remarkable in its breadth and diversity, and remains a historic record of the twentieth century.

Shaw displayed his artistic talents from an early age— without money for materials, he gathered tar from the streets of New York to make sculptures. Shortly after graduating high school, he shared an art studio with the artist Romare Bearden. Shaw eventually turned towards photography but Bearden and Shaw continued to work together throughout their lives. Many of Shaw’s photographs from films, as well as portraits of jazz and blues musicians appear in Bearden’s collages and murals. The two also collaborated on projects with the jazz and literary critic Albert Murray.

In the 1940s, Shaw worked as a courtroom artist, then as a political and sports cartoonist and art director for The Brooklyn Eagle. His career as a photojournalist began with Colliers magazine, which allowed him to travel throughout the United States documenting the lives of coal miners, sharecroppers, burlesque performers, New Orleans’ musicians, civil rights activists, and other everyday people and circumstances. These soulful photographs comprise Shaw’s “Americana” collection, images depicting American life in the mid-twentieth century. Shaw was also an early contributor to the prestigious photographic agency Magnum Photos.

In the early 1950s, Shaw began working in the film industry as a special still photographer. He captured countless stars of the cinema, including Woody Allen, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne, Fred Astaire, Elizabeth Taylor, Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren, Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, and many more. His photographs appeared often on the cover of LIFE and Look magazines, as well as in Paris Match, L’Europeo, The Daily Mail, Der Stern, Harper’s Bazaar, Connaissance des Arts, and others. Shaw preferred to shoot his subjects without set-ups, makeup, or decorations, encouraging them to be spontaneous and improvise— a style that set Shaw’s work apart from the stereotypical Hollywood “glamour” photographs of the day and foreshadowed his later role as an independent filmmaker.

Shaw was also known as a master of publicity for many of the films and stars with whom he worked. In 1951, he photographed Marlon Brando in a ripped t-shirt, a portrait that came to symbolize A Streetcar Named Desire. A few years later, he created the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe with her white skirt blowing over a subway grate in the film The Seven Year Itch. Shaw’s “flying skirt” pictures are some of the most widely seen photographs ever taken.

After years on film sets, Shaw started making films himself in the 1960s. The first film he produced was Paris Blues (1961), starring Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward, Diahann Carroll and Louis Armstrong. Shaw’s good friend Duke Ellington wrote the score for the film. Shaw also worked closely with acclaimed actor-director John Cassavetes, the father of American independent cinema, as an advisor on Cassavetes’ first film Shadows (1959). Shaw went on to produce many of Cassavetes’ films including A Woman Under the Influence (1974), nominated for Best Actress and Best Director at the 1975 Academy Awards, and Gloria (1980), which won the prestigious Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion. In addition, Shaw produced Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970), Opening Night (1977), and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) (he later removed his name as Producer), the latter for which he was also the Production Designer. These films, like Shaw’s pictures, embraced independence and encouraged spontaneity.

John Cassavetes aptly described his best friend Sam as a “Renaissance Man.” Shaw’s true love, however, remained photography. Even as a producer, Shaw remained the special photographer on set, while also helping to create the publicity and advertising campaigns for all the films he produced.

Shaw carried at least two beat-up Nikons around his neck wherever he went; ready to capture anything and anyone that caught his attention in both black and white and color. As a result, Shaw’s photographic archive contains a vast array of subject matter from crime photography, sports, landscapes and photojournalism to classic American and European cinema, independent film, and portraiture. The collection includes photos of prominent musicians, artists, intellectuals, and other well-known individuals such as Marc Chagall, Arthur Miller, Marcel Duchamp, Igor Stravinsky, Joe DiMaggio, Irving Berlin, Tennessee Williams, Patti Smith and Deborah Harry of the rock band Blondie.

Today, Sam Shaw’s legacy and work is preserved and promoted by his children and grandchildren through Shaw Family Archives.

Erika Stone
1924 –
Home page: http://www.erikastone.com
Archive contact: Erika Stone (Erika@erikastone.com) or www.howardgreenberg.com

Erika Stone’s documentary photographs reflect her long, active career as a photo journalist and magazine photographer. In the 40’s, Stone was a member of the legendary Photo League, an organization of photo documentarians which she feels most influenced her approach to her personal photographic work. It was during the years as a League member that she developed her interest in documenting people and at the age of seventeen, produced her Bowery series.

Although she considers herself mostly self-taught, she studied at the New School of Social Research with Bereniece Abbott and George Tice.

Stone was a stringer for both Time and Der Spiegel magazines and worked as a general photojournalist until 1960. After the birth of her two sons, she made photographing children and family her specialty. Her photographs have been and are widely published in magazines and textbooks around the world.

Her books include Pro Techniques of Photographing Children, HP Publishing 1986, Tot Shots, a four book series published by Modern Publishing Company 1987, three books in the Walden Publishing Company’s Open Family series: On Divorce, Fears and Phobias, The Adopted One. Nicole Visits an Amish Farm, Walker Publishing and Learning for Little Kids, Houghton Mifflin, as well as The Whole Child by Putnam.

Stone was one of twenty women photographers whose work was published in an anthology Women of Vision in 1982. Her pictures appeared in the US Camera Annuals 1952, 1954, 1955, and 1956. Her fine art and documentary work is in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, The International Center of Photography, George Eastman House in Rochester, The Portland, Maine Fine Arts Museum, The New York Public Library, and The National Gallery of Ottawa, Canada.

Archive contact:
Patricia Fried
lawrencefried.com

LAWRENCE FRIED (1926-1983)
Larry, as he was known throughout the industry, was an award-winning photojournalists, who covered the political, social, and artistic events of his time for top publications such as The New York Times, Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, Collier’s, and Parade Magazine. Fried became interested in photography while serving as a platoon sargeant with the First Infantry Division during World War II. Using an old camera found on the battlefield, Fried took shots of the battle action and was surprised to learn they were sold to a wire service. Influenced by wartime imagery, he returned to the States and went to the University of Miami on the GI Bill becoming a theatrical director and photographer.
 He returned to his native New York City where he immersed himself its theatrical world, shooting for the Pix Photo Agency. After a quick stint on staff for LIFE, he became a dedicated free-lancer. In his thirty year career he covered a wide range of stories from theatre for the New York Times to three trips into Viet Nam and Cambodia to world leaders such as Chang Kai-shek and President John F. Kennedy. A favorite of the Kennedys, Fried photographed JFK, Robert Kennedy, Ted Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. His Newsweek cover of RFK was chosen for the cover of To Seek A Newer World. His photograph of a mourning Jacqueline Kennedy along with “The Three Rabbis” are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution. While riding in the presidential motorcade covering Lyndon Johnson in1964 for the Saturday Evening Post, his car caught on fire and his leap was captured on the front page of many major newspapers throughout the world including The New York Daily News.

Throughout his career, he photographed an extensive list of musician, actors, and visual artists such as: Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan, Bette Midler, Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Meryl Streep, Marilyn Monroe, Brando, James Dean, Shirley McClaine, Andy Warhol, Richard Serra, and Willem DeKooning. Fried had the distinction of having photographed the most Newsweek covers in the history of the magazine.

Fried was a three-term president and 32 year member of the ASMP, the American Society of Magazine Phtographers, a trade organization and was instrumental in the development of the first Business Practices book in 1973.

In 1975, Fried co-founded The Image Bank calling on friends such as Jay Maisel, Pete Turner, Walter Iooss, and Douglas Kirkland to join. The Image Bank quickly became the premier agency of its kind with franchises all over the world. TIB created a new model of selling stock photography that is followed to this day. Getty Images bought the company in 2000.

Awards. Fried was the recipient of the Photographer of the Year award by the Overseas Press Club, the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Award and the Outstanding Service to ASMP award. For the first time in five administrations, President Dwight Eisenhower granted an exclusive photographic interview with Fried. The resulting photographs earned him the Benjamin Franklin Award for 1959. In 1960 he received the Overseas Press Club Photography Award for outstanding interpretation of foreign news for a series about life in Siberia growing out of his two trips to the Soviet Union where he covered 50,000 miles of Russian territory by train. The idea for the trip came to him after his camera was smashed by a guard at Moscow airport. He was offered an official apology. He refused it and requested special permission for a trans-Siberian trip instead. His request was granted.

Arthur Rothstein
1915 – 1985
website: http://arthurrothsteinarchive.com

Arthur Rothstein grew up in New York City. He had been a student at Columbia University when he met Roy Stryker, an academic who was hired by the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to manage the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration. The Historical Section was created to use photography to document and publicize the large-scale economic dislocations caused by the Great Depression and the widespread displacement and disruption of agricultural communities during Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as well as the government programs designed to assist the displaced. It was subsequently known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography project.

Stryker initially hired Arthur to design and construct the darkroom for the project in Washington, D.C., and he was sent into the field as a photojournalist the following year, 1935, when he was twenty years old. For more than five years he and other FSA photographers traveled the country on assignment for the U.S. government, documenting the plight of displaced farmers, workers, their families and their communities. Today, the public archive of FSA photographs maintained by the Library of Congress contains more than 11,000 photographs taken by Arthur Rothstein.

As the country began to mobilize for World War II, the FSA photography project was transformed into the Office of War Information (OWI). Rothstein left the OWI and had just started working for Look magazine when the United States entered World War II. During the war he covered Europe, India and Burma as a Signal Corps photographer. Rothstein then documented the day-to-day lives of displaced persons (Holocaust survivors) struggling to subsist in the Shanghai Hongkew ghetto, as well as the consequences of the Great Famine in China as Chief Photographer for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1946 and 1947.

He returned to the U.S. and Look magazine, where he served as Director of Photography until its demise in 1971. When Look folded Arthur became Director of Photography at Parade Magazine and spent more time writing and teaching photojournalism and documentary photography until his death in 1985. Throughout his career Rothstein was also an innovator. For example, he was instrumental in the invention of the Xograph, which was the first printing process that enabled mass reproduction of a photograph that appeared, to the unaided eye, to be three-dimensional.

The common thread throughout Arthur’s career, beyond the promotion of technical innovation, was his passion for the use and perpetuation of photojournalism and documentary photography toward the betterment of society. During the 1930s and 1940s he had been an active member of the Photo League, which was dedicated to the use of documentary photography to effect social change.

He loved to share his craft. He loved to mentor young photographers. He authored columns in photography magazines, and produced nine books on photography. Arthur Rothstein, died in 1985 leaving a magnificent historical legacy. His photographs, and those of many of the photographers he mentored, continue to be printed in the media and hung in museums.

Philippe Halsman   1906 – 1979

Archive contact: Irene Halsman (halsman.irene@gmail.com)

Philippe Halsman (b. May 2, 1906 – d. June 25, 1979) was born in Riga, Latvia.  He became one of the great portrait photographers of our time.  He started by studying engineering in Germany, but began his photographic career in Paris, where he designed his own 4 x 5 twin lens reflex camera.

Part of the great exodus of artists and intellectuals who fled the Nazis, Halsman arrived in the United States with his young family in 1940, having obtained an emergency visa through the intervention of Albert Einstein.

Halsman’s prolific career in America over the next 30 years included reportage and covers for every major American magazine.  He had more Life magazine covers (101) to his credit than any other photographer, and three of his well-loved portraits – of Albert Einstein, Adlai Stevenson, and John Steinbeck – were used on United States Postage Stamps.

His colleagues elected him as the first president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (ASMP) in 1944, and in 1958, he was chosen as one of the world’s Ten Greatest Photographers in an international poll.   He was the recipient of the ASMP Life Achievement in Photography Award in 1975.   Beginning in 1986, the ASMP instituted an annual Philippe Halsman Award for Photojournalism.

His work is represented in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the United States and abroad.  Among his many one-man exhibitions was a retrospective that began at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1979 and continued to tour the United States until 1988.

He was on the faculty of the Famous Photographers School, and from 1970-1979, he taught a seminar on Psychological Portraiture at the New School in New York City.

Halsman Portraits, published in 1983, is a survey of his contribution to the art of portraiture.  Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book, is a collection of portraits of famous people jumping, first published in 1959 and reissued in 1986.  Both books were published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

With the publication of Halsman, a Retrospective, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery mounted a huge exhibition which toured the United States in 1998 and also went to the Tate Gallery in London and the Hotel de Sully in Paris.

1935-

Home Page: http://www.philiptrager.com/

Contact: phtr@earthlink.net

Active as a photographer for more than forty years, Philip Trager is a preeminent photographer of dance and architecture. His photographs of contemporary dancers and performance artists have expanded the genre of dance photography. His book, The Villas of Palladio, has become a standard document for architects and architectural historians. His most recent books are Philip Trager, a retrospective book, and Faces, both published by Steidl.

Four of his ten books have been chosen for the annual books selection of The New York Times Annual Review of Books. Among other book awards are Finalist for the Grand Prix Award at Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Book of the Year for the American Institute of Graphic Arts and Best Books selections of Interview, Vanity Fair, The Times (London), New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times Book Review and others.

Trager’s photographs are in international private, corporate and institutional collections. In New York, they are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, New York Historical Society, and the New York Public Library (which recently acquired eighty photographs). The Library of Congress has acquired the definitive collection of his photographs and will house his archive as part of its core collections.

There have been numerous exhibitions of Trager’s photographs internationally, including a traveling retrospective exhibition of his work presented at several venues, including  The National Building Museum in cooperation with the Library of Congress. The New York Public Library recently mounted a major exhibition of his work.