Capturing stars
COVER STORY
Continues from page 29 important, but you also need enough information to get a sense of time and place and personality, and then the design is the composition. I try to shoot fullframe, rather than cropping afterwards, so I have to compose in an instant, through the viewfinder. It’s all about capturing what [pioneering French photojournalist] Henri CartierBresson called ‘The decisive moment’.’’
Sometimes this moment doesn’t even need a human subject present. While covering the famous civil rights marches in the American south, Schapiro captured many now iconic images of Dr Martin Luther King. But just hours after King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Schapiro flew down to his abandoned hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee. His photograph of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, with King’s open suitcase, crumpled shirts, scattered coffee cups and ashtrays beneath a black and white TV set bolted to the wall, the screen showing ghostly news footage of King himself, is hollow with absence.
‘‘I also went across the road and photographed the bathroom where the gunman was when he shot him. Then I made a triptych with King’s hotel room, the room where the shot was fired, and a smeary handprint on the wall that could only have been made by the gunman as he stood in that bath to shoot out the window. To me it tells the whole frightening story in three connected photographs.’’
Schapiro’s photographs of people, meanwhile, often feel unusually candid, like glimpses into the subject’s soul.
‘‘I think that’s true. That picture I took of Dustin Hoffman jumping in a hotel hallway – that shows a spontaneous, witty side of him you might not ordinarily see. Did you see the picture of Ike and Tina Turner in front of the oil painting in their house? She looks happy, but he’s glaring, like, you really need to get outta here! He comes across as a pretty unpleasant man, which I think he was. Same thing with that picture of Scorcese when he picked up the gun on the Taxi Driver set, or the crazy-looking Marlon Brando smile I caught when they were putting on his makeup for The Godfather. These things just happened and, luckily, I caught this great fraction of a second that gives you some insight into the man in front of the lens.’’
Schapiro plays down his own technical skill. Part of the reason he got these shots was luck, he says, and his own talent for invisibility. ‘‘Forty per cent of photography is public relations. Most people enjoy being photographed, so long as they