Steve Schapiro Photographed Icons From Warhol to MLK—Here’s How He Made History

November 15, 2025 

Artnet

by Min Chen

Steve Schapiro Photographed Icons From Warhol to MLK—Here’s How He Made History

Preview a clip of Schapiro's work with Andy Warhol, part of a new documentary tracing the late photographer's remarkable career.

Being Everywhere, the new documentary on Steve Schapiro, is perfectly titled. Over more than five decades, the legendary photography shot visual artists, musicians, and celebrities, landed on movie sets as much as migrant farms, and was present on the scene of Civil Rights marches and Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential campaign. “If you name a subject,” the late Schapiro said in the film while standing amid his archive, “I could probably come up with it.”

Directed by screenwriter and filmmaker Maura Smith, the documentary unpacks Schapiro’s life through his many, many images. His work with big names including Barbara Streisand, Marlon Brando, and Muhammad Ali opens the proceedings, but it’s his increasing immersion in the social justice movements of the 1960s that lends the film its heft. Woven throughout is his vivid storytelling, buoyed by his wry humor and acute observations. It’s a fascinating portrait.

As Schapiro’s wife, Smith had no issue getting the photographer to open up about his extraordinary career. “It was an easy target,” she told me over a video call. “It took us only two days to film it because I would just say, ‘Oh, tell that one,’ you know? I knew most of his stories.”

Chasing the Decisive Moment

Schapiro was born in 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, and was converted to photography after learning about Henri Cartier-Bresson and his “decisive moment.” The photographer would seek out that moment throughout his career, beginning in 1961, with his photos evincing raw spontaneity and evocative framing.

“The things that are important in a photograph are emotion, design, and information,” he said in the film. “If you can get all three of those in your photograph, I think you’re okay.”

Schapiro’s work would be printed in dozens of magazines (including on the first cover of People) and film posters (he was on the set of some 400 movies). But it was his time documenting migrant workers in Arkansas and drug addiction in New York that awakened his social conscience; a 1963 trip through the Deep South with author James Baldwin would further thrust the photographer into the Civil Rights Movement. Throughout the decade, Schapiro would photograph the March to Washington and the Selma to Montgomery march, as well as the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

For Smith, the challenging task was selecting images from Schapiro’s massive trove for inclusion in the film. His archive, in her view, might number in the region of two million pictures—but, “who knows?” she admitted. With help from her son, she landed on a mix of Schapiro’s celebrity images and photojournalism, in a process she described as “ruthless.”

One major art world figure who made the final cut? Andy Warhol, who Schapiro photographed between 1965–66, when the Pop artist was rising through New York’s creative ranks.

In the exclusive preview clip below, the photographer recalls how he came to document Warhol and his crew for Life magazine: Schapiro pitched a feature on the artist to the publication after Warhol apparently grew jealous that curator Henry Geldzahler was getting the spotlight. An even more telling revelation, perhaps, is Warhol’s tendency to ask questions, even responding to other questions with more questions. “It’s part of his style,” Schapiro noted dryly.

The photographer and the artist, in Smith’s view, were “cut from the same cloth.” Schapiro, too, enjoyed asking questions, a curiosity borne out in his work. And he loved art, eager as he was to visit museums when he traveled and collect the works of painters in the 1960s, Smith said. She recalled that while living in Los Angeles, they installed a basketball hoop for their son in their living room—right beneath a Warhol painting.

“I still think, ‘Why in the world did we not move that painting? What was wrong with us?'” she said, laughing. “But anyway, we no longer have that painting, but it did not get destroyed.”

Still Everywhere

Schapiro died in 2022, aged 87. But his work is still making its way into the world. Smith told me about a forthcoming book of Schapiro’s jazz photographs that have long gone unpublished. The reason being, she explained, that Schapiro would often insist, “I’m not a music guy and there’s so many good music photographers.” But after going through more than 10,000 negatives of his jazz images over the past few years, she stressed: “He photographed plenty of music. Steve, you were a music photographer.”

In fact, the documentary’s title, suggesting Schapiro’s invariable presence in the art, film, music, and political worlds, could also allude to how his images are, quite simply, everywhere. You see them adorning the posters for Midnight Cowboy (1969) and The Godfather (1972). They’re on the covers of David Bowie’s 1976 record Station to Station and the centennial edition of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. His images of artists from Magritte to Warhol helped define the men and their milieus for the ages; his vital Civil Rights pictures, as filmmaker Ava DuVernay noted, “moved minds during a crucial time.”

To leave behind such a footprint takes keen instinct as much as deep empathy—Being Everywhere reveals Schapiro had both. The film is capped by his urging of young photographers to pick up their cameras, he said, “to change the world with your images.”

“Steve dealt with so many different people—politicians, celebrities, everyday junkies,” Smith said. “I just hope everybody else can be as kind as Steve was, no matter who you encounter, doesn’t matter if they’re important or not. You treat everyone the same way. I think Steve was really good about that—he was a master at that.”

Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere is in theaters November 14.