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| photo by Stephen Shames |
| Click photo above to view gallery. |
He came of age at a time when photojournalists and documentary photographers began to plumb social issues and American culture with a depth and originality never before seen. But Stephen Shames says his real themes are the basics of the human condition: “My focus is love, hate, abuse, neglect, and hope,” he says. “I photograph survivors, children who achieve redemption in a hostile world.”
Shames began taking pictures seriously while he was in college, at the University of California at Berkeley, in the mid-1960s. His first real project was a documentary effort about the Black Panther Party, which had taken root in nearby Oakland. “I met the Panthers in 1967 and continued to photograph them intensively,” says Shames. That work is being collected in a new book,The Black Panthers, out this fall from Aperture. “My work often has to wait years to get in print,” says Shames. “Then, when magazines finally get around to doing some of the stories I pioneered, they don’t use my photos because they are ‘too old.’”
“Shames’s work is highly individualist,” says Naudet. The photographer himself says his pictures are “content driven, not graphically driven.” Over the past four decades he’s worked on a variety of tough, unglamorous subjects: poverty, child prostitution, street kids in India, AIDS orphans, and teen sexuality, among them. And he’s still as committed as ever, even when he can’t find a publisher. He is currently working on a book with children in northern Uganda.
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