STEVE SCHAPIRO: BEING EVERYWHERE reviewed by Katherine Stockton

Steve Schapiro was born in 1934 – the year Adolf Hitler became the Führer and two years before the launch of Life magazine. Schapiro’s lifespan coincided with six decades in which history rattled over (and over) major turning points, and six decades of photojournalism that captured each clatter: the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. 35-millimetre film birthed the mid-century ‘decisive moment’ and photojournalism became the medium of historical consciousness. STEVE SCHAPIRO: BEING EVERYWHERE documents the career of Steve Shapiro, who, since 1961, photographed the climacterics of 20th-century America.

Maura Smith’s documentary describes Schapiro’s photojournalism as quintessentially fly on the wall, yet in BEING EVERYWHERE his forceful charisma as narrator-subject goes anything but unnoticed.

Smith captures our narrator in situ. From there, Schapiro conjures his own portraiture through his mannerisms: he straddles his chair backwards – leather peeling at the top, implying the busy fingertips that have frayed it. Schapiro is walled in by archival filing cabinets with further peeling handwritten labels denoting his photographic subjects. These cabinets are as vast as a library, the contents of which we will later learn Schapiro has an encyclopaedic memory of. He wields a flask too large to be called a hipflask, the refreshment within unknown, his eyes are hidden behind dark rims. He suddenly remembers, with an unaffected “oh”, winning a Lucie Award at Carnegie Hall. He misremembers Aleister Crowley as “Alexander”.

These memory lapses lend the film the quality of a last testament. Smith’s unobtrusive direction grants Schapiro control, guiding us through his memories as they arise. Schapiro whets our palate with his work in culture: Barbara Streisand in profile, Andy Warhol at a party, Scorsese on set. One shot is of Gary Oldman on the set of 1992 Dracula, smoking a cigarette in prosthetic finger extensions tipped in decaying claws. It lets us know that although Count Dracula may “never drink... v/wine”, he does indeed smoke.

The documentary crests as Schapiro turns to his political work. He is utterly omnipresent: attending the last Christmas Robert F. Kennedy would have with his family, accessing Martin Luther King’s Lorraine Motel room the morning after his assassination, marching from Selma, marching Washington, stalled-in at the 64’ World Fair protests. The title captures the mythos of a man who seemed always to be where history was made.

The sprawling archive of Schapiro’s work is foregrounded in photographic stills throughout. This flip-book style exhibit of his prolific work could have constituted a short film in itself – Schapiro’s photographic canon is that significant. Yet Smith’s frame leaves us wondering what Schapiro thought of his role in shaping collective memory. He is never asked to reflect on the responsibilities of the photojournalist whose work defines visual perceptions of history.

Smith’s denouement captures Schapiro’s final weeks. We witness what may be an emergency baptism: “I do’s” muttered with crying shudders as he is asked to reject Satan, while a silent Smith provides him company from behind the camera. BEING EVERYWHERE says a final goodbye to a man as contradictory and eclectic, as forceful and charming, as forgotten and remembered, censored and memorialised, as the whirligig century he captured.