A Lifetime in Photography — Blind Journal

“The great thing about being a photojournalist is your camera is a ticket to go anywhere,” says photographer Stephen Shames. “I try to convey pure emotion in my pictures, to get behind the scenes, to find a different angle so my pictures reveal what is beneath the surface. Having a distinct vision allows a photographer to be more poetic. Trust your vision. Go where it takes you.”

Stephen Shames has seen lots in his greater than a five-decade profession. He has coated every part from the Black Panthers, to little one poverty, to political leaders, and every part in between from all corners of the world. Published by Kehrer Verlag, Stephen Shames: A Lifetime in Photography presents a complete assortment of Shame’s work, in addition to an eponymous exhibition on the famend Visa pour l’picture competition in Perpignan, France. Both include not simply iconic pictures from his profession but in addition many who have been beforehand unpublished.

Stephen Shames’ profession started when he was a scholar on the University of California, Berkley in 1967. He purchased a used digital camera from a pawn store. This easy buy—a small Pentax, he recollects—kindled in him the need to change into a photographer. His father had come for a go to from Los Angeles, and the 2 of them have been marching by way of the streets of San Francisco in the course of the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Shames’ eye caught Bobby Seale and Huey Newton of their leather-based jackets promoting Mao’s Red Book, and their confidence and charisma drew him in. He took one body, and finally confirmed them a print, and he was in.

“I started hanging out with the Panthers, attending their rallies. Bobby Seale became my mentor and friend. He introduced me to David and June Hilliard, Big Man, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, Emory Douglas, and his brother John Seale,” Shames recollects. “I was granted incredible access. Over the next seven years, culminating in Bobby Seale’s 1973 campaign for mayor of Oakland, I documented this group of young men and women, who were at the forefront of the Black Power Movement and who became the vanguard of the revolution that was sweeping America.”

During his early years with the Black Panthers, Stephen Shames was not solely a privileged witness; he additionally turned a touring companion. In 1970, whereas photographing Huey Newton upon his return from jail, he was the one photographer allowed within the room. This closeness earned him uncommon belief, but in addition harmful conditions. During a protest, he was arrested by the police and briefly detained, his digital camera confiscated. Shames recounts how he continuously needed to juggle his position as a documentarian with the notion of the authorities, who noticed him as an activist.

While Shames’ work with the Black Panthers might be his most well-known work and has been printed in quite a few books over time, it’s not all that he has completed. And there was a selected theme that has underlined a lot of it.

“Although I photographed many diverse subjects and people from countless cultures, there is a thread connecting my pictures,” Shames explains. “Much of my photography is about children in distress with a focus on identity and family: what tears us apart and binds us together—violence and abuse, but also sensuality, love, hope, and transcendence.”

Through Marty Roysher, a university roommate and who was on the steering committee of the Free Speech Movement, he met Marian Wright Edelman. Edelman was the President of the Children’s Defense Fund on the time, the premier advocacy group working as a voice for youngsters. “I met with her, and she told me about the more than 12 million American children living in poverty. They constitute one half of all poor people in America. I decided to document the poor children in the United States,” tells Stephen Shames. “This became my first published book, Outside the Dream: Child Poverty in America.” The story of kids on the fringes of the “American dream.

While engaged on his undertaking, he met a bit of lady dwelling in a automotive together with her mom within the Midwest. Rather than limiting himself to the uncooked picture of poverty, Shames took the time to return, to study their title, their story. This human method, he says, is on the coronary heart of his pictures: establishing a connection earlier than taking pictures. This picture would change into probably the most putting within the e book, utilized by the Children’s Defense Fund to lift consciousness amongst American politicians. Later, he would proceed this work by photographing kids “outside the dream” world wide, notably in Africa.

In the Nineteen Nineties, when he traveled to Uganda to doc the impression of AIDS on orphans, he was struck by the dignity of the youngsters he photographed. When a journalist requested him how he endured a lot ache, he replied: “What I remember is not the misery, but the resilience. These children laughed, played, invented games despite everything.” This capability to seize not solely struggling but in addition the quiet pleasure, braveness, and great thing about on a regular basis life has change into considered one of Stephen Shames’s signatures.

Shames has since printed 11 monographs of his work, has received quite a few awards, and has had his work underwritten by the likes of The Ford Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott, Robert Wood Johnson, and Annie E. Casey Foundations. But that is the primary retrospective of his work bringing all of it collectively. 

The e book itself is fantastically printed, with the pictures printed as double web page spreads for horizontal pictures, and full-page bleeds for vertical ones. Combined with the dimensions of the e book, it permits one to essentially research the pictures in entrance of you. Interestingly, the work can also be not introduced chronologically. Rather it jumps in time, and between topics. The pictures circulation collectively in a daydream like means, as in how reminiscences come again to you.

Presented from August 30 to September 14, 2025, on the Visa pour l’picture competition in Perpignan, the eponymous exhibition was acquired with emotion. The group praises the human depth of its photos, from the Panthers to little one poverty, highlighting “Shames’ ability to reveal the profound truths behind major collective issues.”

“I think most people remember in this way when they are thinking about things. Images pop up as we recall things from our lives, not in chronological order but one image leads to another,” Shames explains. “The book is organized around images that flow from one to the next in the same way we recall our lives. The images work together to create a lifetime in photography in dream-like sequences.”

Lots has modified on the planet of pictures and photojournalism since Shames started again in 1967. It has at all times been a tough career, but it surely has gotten tougher. Access is rather more difficult. Jobs are fewer. And there are fewer shops that present lengthy kind pictures. All of this makes it a lot tougher to make a dwelling simply doing this kind of work for the youthful technology. But there are methods to outlive and nonetheless do essential work.

“My advice is to only embark on a photography career if you would literally die if you could not take photos because it is a hard road emotionally and financially,” Stephen Shames explains. “Do another well-paying job and be an amateur photographer. For those who have to be photographers you need to find ways to make money. Magazines and newspapers are not giving assignments to many. Photographers have turned to NGOs and nonprofits who need photos to raise money. Others do commercial work and then do their projects on their own.”

Looking again at his profession, Stephen Shames has additionally realized some essential classes by way of his work world wide. “The most important lesson for me is to try to understand the community you are photographing. To look with fresh eyes and to believe what you experience even when, especially when, it goes against your preconceived notions. We all live in a cultural and family bubble. The idea is to get out of your bubble and see things with new eyes.”

Stephen Shames: A Lifetime in Photography is printed by Kehrer Verlag and could be bought by way of for 55€ here. The eponymous exhibition is on view till September 14, 2025 at Visa pour l’image in Perpignan, France.

More about Stephen Shames could be discovered on his website.