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With an exhibition that gathers almost three dozen image-defining photographs of Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali from the 1960s, Jackson Fine Art’s Steve Schapiro: Warhol & Ali pays tribute to the artist, both as renowned photographer and a friend of the gallery. A joyous celebration of a life’s work, the exhibit is on view through March 18.
Over a career that spanned six decades, Schapiro demonstrated an unwavering ability to find the humanity in his subjects and the essence of the person beneath the veneer of celebrity. His moments in time became the milestones of our culture. We already know many of them. The vision of Martin Luther King’s room at the Lorraine Motel where, on the morning after his assassination in April 1968, his “spirit . . . float[ed] out,” as Schapiro describes it, “from the television set on the wall from which King continued to speak.”
Then there is the banality of King’s assailant’s deadly vantage point from a dirty bathtub in the rooming house across the street. Another photograph shows Bobby Kennedy, arms outstretched saint-like on the campaign trail or playing touch football with his team of children at Hickory Hill.
Schapiro’s Freedom Summer photograph of John Lewis was Time’s cover upon Lewis’ death. He photographed the best and the brightest, or at least the most recognizable, for Life, Look, Time and Sports Illustrated, and gave us images from the sets of movies such as The Godfather, Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver.
Why, then, focus an exhibition around these two men, Warhol and Ali, when Schapiro produced almost 800,000 negative strips in his career? The reason may be partly sentimental. Schapiro died in January 2022. This exhibition falls around the one-year mark of his death.
When Jackson Fine Art director Anna Walker Skillman visited her respected friend and colleague at his Chicago home and studio in late fall 2021, he was at work on his 12th monograph, the Taschen collection Andy Warhol & Friends. Nobody, it seems, knew him better than Schapiro, and, so, why not Warhol? And, well, these are wonderful images.
Schapiro met Warhol in 1963, and in 1964 began photographing him over a period of several years for a Life magazine story that never ran. The highlights are all here. Warhol at the Factory, the aluminum-foiled, silver-painted loft in Manhattan where he made his early paintings and movies. Lou Reed and Nico with the Velvet Underground, for whom Warhol would become manager for a while, at the Factory and in Los Angeles. Andy with Campbell’s soup cans and his famous cow wallpaper, and always with that enigmatic pose he cultivated.
A quote from Schapiro accompanies the photographs in the front room to reveal his grasp of his subject: “It appeared to me that, unlike the movie stars that Andy admired for their charisma, he created a public image of having no charisma at all.”
Warhol’s studied, but emotionless, mask allowed him to watch everything around him without showing any reaction, except, that is, for the one time it seems he did.
“I believe I did see the real Andy once,” wrote Schapiro, “when I photographed him and [muse] Edie Sedgwick at a party (Andy Loves Edie, Andy Warhol & Edie Sedgwick, Los Angeles, 1966) . . . Andy seemed so totally enthralled with Edie’s charm that night, and his face lit up into a warm, human smile that I had never seen before and never would again.”
Schapiro captured a different never-again moment when on assignment for Sports Illustrated in 1963 he photographed a young Olympic gold medalist at his home in Louisville, Kentucky.
“Playing Monopoly with a 21-year-old boxer named Cassius Clay at his home, I might have guessed at, but could not have foreseen, his emergence as the great Muhammad Ali,” Schapiro wrote. But looking at these photographs now, 60 years later, we can, and we can see that somehow Schapiro did, too. On display is the nascent, and certainly innate, charm, charisma and drive that would make Ali “the greatest” he proclaimed to be.
Apparently, Ali loved playing Monopoly with anyone and everyone, and he wanted to win — every time. Schapiro captures gentleness and grace beneath the bravado with a close-up of the delicacy of his rough-knuckled hands. He shows us Ali at the table with his doting mother Odessa and shadowboxing in her living room, and he captures his playfulness with local children who flocked to him and apparently adored him.
In the best of these, Schapiro finds a seemingly insignificant, and utterly irreproducible, moment that would reverberate through Ali’s life in ways that none could have predicted.
Ali with Lonnie, Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) and Yolanda Williams, Louisville, Kentucky, 1963, (below) shows Ali seated with a small group of young boys, one of whom had just run home to get his 6-year-old sister who was home alone. Ali leans in and cocks his head as if to listen more carefully to what the little girl is saying.
In a delightful recounting at the gallery on the day after the opening, Schapiro’s widow Maura Smith told the tale behind the photograph: Her husband had just captured the moment that Ali met the little girl who grew up to become the woman he married in 1986.
Accompanying the image in the gallery is a framed letter to Schapiro from Lonnie, Ali’s last wife and protector, in which she thanks Schapiro for his book Schapiro’s Heroes. Lonnie had long held the photograph taken that day but she never knew who made it until she saw a copy of his book.
The power of photography rests in its ability to still a singular moment within the flow of time. We are so fortunate that Schapiro was of our time. It seems he experienced most of it, too; from the cult of celebrity to the trials by fire of the heroes of the early civil rights movement he deeply respected, he gave back to us what he witnessed so that we could see it too and be more fully present in our own lives.
Just like that first meeting between future partners in Louisville, Kentucky, the first portrait Schapiro took of Warhol is also here. When the two met at the Factory in 1963, Warhol told Schapiro that he had been an artist for several years but really wanted to be a tap dancer. Schapiro told him that he had been a photographer for five years, but really wanted to be a magician. I think he already was.
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Donna Mintz is a visual artist who writes about art and literature. A current studio artist at Atlanta Contemporary, her work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art and MOCA GA. She writes for the Sewanee Review, Sculpture magazine, BurnAway, and ArtsATL, where she is a regular contributor. She recently completed a book on the life of writer James Agee and holds an MFA from Sewanee’s School of Letters at the University of the South.
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