Steve Schapiro: American Edge

Steve Schapiro traveled throughout America photographing & recording people & issues during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. His first essays, which documented narcotic addiction in East Harlem & the migrant workers of Arkansas, gave Schapiro considerable attention, & earned him prestigious assignments for the thriving picture/news magazines Life, Look, Time, & Newsweek. For the very first time, American Edge brings together ninety of Schapiro's searing images that can only be described as reportage in the classic tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, & Diane Arbus. Schapiro's photographs of the 1960s show the collective American psyche torn apart by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy & Martin Luther King, Vietnam, & the Civil Rights Movement. The photographer traveled with Bobby Kennedy during his presidential campaign, & with writer James Baldwin through the American South. Schapiro covered the New York art scene, documenting Andy Warhol's Factory, & the hippie & protest movements sweeping the universities, & culminating in the riots of 1968. American Edge reveals the increasing disparity between the rich & poor, racial & class conflict, & the burgeoning American middle class & its materialist desires. Counted among the countless women & men portrayed include Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ike & Tina Turner, Simon & Garfunkel, Robert Rauschenberg, Janis Joplin, & Andy Warhol. American Edge represents a major rediscovery of one of the most talented documentary photographers of the late twentieth century.Steve Schapiro is the author of 'Steve Schapiro: American Edge', published 2000 under ISBN 9781892041319 and ISBN 1892041316.