Clay shooting
Photographer Steve Schapiro’s new book Ali showcases his portraits of the young Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali. Steve Fairclough talks to him about these memorable images
Steve Fairclough talks to Steve Schapiro about his portraits of cassius clay
In the early 1960s Steve Schapiro was carving out a career for himself as a photojournalist when he got an assignment from Sports
Illustrated magazine to shoot a 21-year-old boxing phenomenon, who was then simply known by his birth name Cassius Clay. Schapiro recalls, ‘He was living at his parents’ house [in Louisville, Kentucky] so they sent me there to photograph him. That’s how I started photographing Muhammad Ali.’
The assignment was a five-day shoot, during which Schapiro hung out with Clay in Louisville and also accompanied the rising star on a road trip to New York City. All of this is showcased in the new book
Ali, which includes intimate images of ‘ The Greatest’ at home and on the road, as well as a unique image of Ali with one of his future wives.
Of the shoot Schapiro remembers, ‘It just turned out to be a very photographic situation. I would be with him all the time, every day. He was getting ready to go to London where he was going to fight [Henry] Cooper and if he won that fight, which he did, he then would meet [Sonny] Liston [for the World Heavyweight Championship], so that was a big thing.’ Despite being commissioned by
Sports Illustrated, Schapiro had few precise plans for the shoot. He admits, ‘I rarely have a plan going into something because I have no idea what I’ll find when I start something. I didn’t have a real plan going into it and I had certainly never met him before, so it was like a whole, new experience.’
Unsurprisingly, Schapiro quickly discovered that Ali was a local hero. ‘All the kids in the neighbourhood loved him and he used to ride his bicycle with them all the time. They loved to come to the house and start punching at him, pretending to be fighting with him. He loved the kids and he used to sit on the front steps of the house just talking and kidding around with them.’
One of the images in the book is particularly poignant. In February 2012, Steve Schapiro received a letter from Ali’s wife Lonnie. She had been in a hair salon in Scottsdale, Arizona, and noticed the book Schapiro’s Heroes, which included an image of her brother with Ali in 1963. Later that same week Lonnie was at the funeral of Ali’s legendary trainer Angelo Dundee where she met photographer Howard Bingham, who also wrote Ali’s biography, and asked him about Schapiro’s images of Ali. Bingham, who died in December 2016, was able to confirm that Schapiro had shot the pictures and also that he knew Schapiro and had met him recently in Los Angeles.
Schapiro explains, ‘I got this message from Lonnie Ali, in which she said I’d gotten a picture of her near Muhammad Ali sitting on the steps and she never knew who the photographer was. Now she’d found out it was me and asked, “Do you have any other pictures of
me?” She said that at that time (in 1963) she was a six-and-ahalf-year-old girl and he [Ali] was 21-years-old.’
He continues, ‘So I went through my contact sheets and I found this picture ( below), which I never would have done anything with if I hadn’t gotten her phone call or email. It’s this incredible picture, which is in the book, of Lonnie Ali at the age of six-and-a-half and Muhammad [Ali] with their eyes absolutely locked on each other. There were other kids around but you just see this emotional contact between them. That picture is the exact moment when they first met and when their eyes locked on each other.’
In 1986, 23 years after their first meeting on Ali’s front porch, Lonnie Ali became Ali’s fourth wife and was with him and cared for him up until his death in June 2016, at the age of 74.
A trip to New York
The shoot also involved a memorable road trip to New York City, during which Ali was scheduled to meet his boxing hero, the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson. Schapiro reveals, ‘All the time while we were travelling [from Louisville to New York] he was a very quiet guy and he was very quiet at home. It wasn’t all the “I’m Muhammad Ali! I’m here! I’m the greatest!”, all of that ( laughs).’
Ali had an appointment to meet Robinson at Sugar Ray’s gym but there was no sign of him when they arrived. ‘He was very excited all the way into New York and then when we got to Sugar Ray’s gym he became very quiet because it was a big let down,’ notes Schapiro. ‘We finally gave up and got in a car and drove to 125th Street in Harlem; suddenly we saw Sugar Ray going from his club into his office. He then did meet with Sugar Ray and there are pictures in the book of him and Sugar Ray which I don’t think have ever been published before.’
Cameras and films
During the 1963 Ali shoot Schapiro was working with his trusty Nikon cameras – indeed he remains a Nikon shooter to this day. ‘At that point they would have been rangefinder cameras – the S2 and S3 – with black-and-white [Kodak] Tri-X film. I was probably using a 35mm and a 105mm – the two lenses I used the most. I might have used a 180mm for something and I also had a 28mm.’
Schapiro confesses that he always tended to wait for the moment, rather than taking a scattergun approach to shooting. ‘I don’t tend to “speed shoot”. I usually go for one image, so each image is separate or there are four or five of the same
‘ That picture is the exact moment when they first met and when their eyes locked on each other’
image. I didn’t use a motor on anything so there’s a limit [to how much you can shoot]. But there are certainly quite a number of contact sheets.’
As to how many images he captured during the five-day Ali shoot Schapiro admits, ‘I don’t know exactly but it had to be a number of hundreds of images. I shot a number of rolls and there were 36 images on each roll, so that’s a fair amount. I would say 1,000 or 2,000 images, but I’m really not sure.’
A nal meeting
In 2014 Schapiro was to meet Ali for a final time at a hotel in Chicago, ‘Lonnie asked me to come over and he wasn’t doing too well at that point. He was very cognisant of what was happening but he really wasn’t talking. He was having good days and bad days and this wasn’t his best day.’
He recalls, ‘We exchanged prints but he hadn’t been signing prints at all at that point. One day Lonnie went out and when she came back he’d signed a whole bunch of prints. He really liked the picture of him with the Monopoly set and he really liked the sequenced pictures of him doing shadow boxing in the living room.’
Of the new book Schapiro says, ‘I think it shows a different side of Ali. It’s not a boxing book per se. It’s a book that really gives you a sense of his personality. You see all the pictures with his mother, who was very close to him at the time, and you see him with Sugar Ray [Robinson] – you can see how excited he was and how well they got on together.’
As for his relationship with Ali, Schapiro recalls, ‘We got along just fine. He was a very well-bred boy. His manners were excellent and there was no side to him that was in any way difficult. He loved fried chicken and there are pictures in the book of his mother giving him fried chicken ( below). There’s one in which he is “punching” her and there’s even a story that when he was four-years-old he punched her and knocked out one of her teeth!’