Photographer Steve Schapiro is best known for documenting the American century. He photographed the civil rights movement, following James Baldwin through the Jim Crow South and Martin Luther King Jr. during the Selma to Montgomery marches. His photographs appeared in Life, Look, Newsweek, and Time. He shot the first cover ever of People magazine and created some of the most enduring images from films like The Godfather and Taxi Driver.
Yet despite all that, Schapiro was never known as a jazz photographer.
Until now.
In 1961, while still in his twenties, Schapiro spent a year documenting New York's jazz scene. He photographed recording sessions for Riverside Records and performances around the city, creating thousands of images of musicians including Johnny Griffin, Jimmy Heath, Bobby Timmons, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, and Miles Davis.
When that year ended, he packed the negatives away in boxes and moved on. More than fifty years later, in his eighties, Schapiro began revisiting the archive: over 20,000 photographs documenting jazz during one of its most vibrant periods.
What he found were intimate moments that had been hiding in boxes for half a century. Cannonball Adderley asleep in the studio. The Bill Evans Trio sitting around a table between sets at the Village Vanguard. Count Basie laughing in a dressing room. Sonny Rollins lifting weights backstage at the Apollo Theater.
After Schapiro died in 2022, his wife, Maura, and son, Theo, continued the work of organizing the collection.
Together with jazz writer Richard Scheinen, they narrowed thousands of photographs down to roughly 250 images for a new book, Steve Schapiro Jazz.
At the time the book was assembled, only five of the musicians pictured were still living. One of them was Sonny Rollins. Rollins was so moved by the photographs that he wrote the book's foreword. He wrote:
"These pictures are very emotional for me. They take me back to a time when everything was — you could say — copasetic. Here I am, the last guy standing."
With Rollins now gone as well, those words carry even more weight.
The photographs are remarkable because they are so unguarded. Schapiro had a gift for capturing people at their most natural.
Richard Scheinen, who wrote the book's accompanying essays, told me:
"I think he just put people at ease, and he respected them and their craft and just captured something really remarkable. The pictures are so intimate, and they're not romanticized. They're not like cigarettes whirling up through shadows. They're just these men and women at work in the studio.
They're focused. They're beautifully dressed. Their sleeves are rolled up just so, and you get a sense of the seriousness and professionalism of these musicians.
People are always talking about jazz musicians during this period being alcoholics and junkies. Maybe some of these guys had those issues at one time or another. But you look at these photos, and there's no sense of that. They're professionals at work. They're relaxed. You can almost feel the breath flowing down the horn and being channeled into a beautiful note. I just find the photos very intimate and moving."
At a moment when nearly everything is documented, it's surprising to discover that history can still be hiding in plain sight.
The recordings haven't changed.
But once you've seen these photographs, it's harder to think of these musicians as monuments. You see them laughing. Resting. Concentrating. Showing up for work.
As singer Kurt Elling writes in the book's afterword, these photographs remind us that the innovators we place in the pantheon of jazz were, above all, human beings.
Steve Schapiro Jazz is published by ACC Art Books.
Schapiro's jazz photographs were not the only surprise he left behind. His wife, Maura Smith, a filmmaker who documented the final years of his life in the film Being Everywhere, told me: "We've accidentally found some other material that, you know, we have, like, 20,000 negatives of that subject."
So one can only speculate what the next book from the Steve Schapiro archive will be.
You can hear my full conversation with Maura Smith and Richard Scheinin via the audio player below:
