From The Black Panthers To 9/11, See 33 Powerful Images Captured By Photojournalist Stephen Shames

For more than 50 years, photojournalist Stephen Shames has used images to illustrate social issues across America and beyond — standing up for those whose voices often go unheard.

There’s a common saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Since time immemorial, people have used pictures to tell stories, convey emotions, and record history — and the purpose of a picture has remained largely the same for thousands of years.

Of course, in the past two centuries, rapid technological advancement has changed the way we think about pictures. The development of photography enabled a process that once took hours to instead take mere seconds. Grainy daguerreotypes gave way to high-resolution photographs captured on a phone at a moment’s notice. Photography has allowed humanity to capture and catalog history as it happens, and, more importantly, share that experience with people all over the world.

Few people know the power of a photograph better than Stephen Shames, however. Shames, a photojournalist with more than 50 years of experience, has spent most of his life traveling the world and capturing the lives of the people he’s met. His work has focused, in particular, on societal issues like child poverty and civil rights, highlighting the day-to-day battles that many have fought as they pave the way for true social change and equality. Moreover, Shames has used his work to identify and champion solutions to the issue of child poverty in America.

Of Shames, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter once said, “Stephen Shames has captured the spirit of thousands of programs across our country that are quietly but stubbornly making the lives of children and families better in spite of the bleak circumstances in which they live.”

Shames sat down for an interview with All That’s Interesting while promoting his new book, Stephen Shames: A Lifetime in Photography, published by Kehrer Verlag, to share his reflections on photography, society, and how the two intersect and influence each other.

You can also see a sample collection of his photography below.

“The World Was Just Exploding” — How The 1960s Led Stephen Shames To Photography

Stephen Shames was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1947, and as he explained, he had always wanted to be an artist.

“My mom was a poet and a writer,” he said, “so we always had art in the house. When I was in high school, there was a photography club, which I didn’t actually take part in, but one of my favorite teachers ran it, so I was kind of exposed to it. When I went to Berkeley, the world was just exploding, you know, I graduated from high school in 1965, and that was the year the civil rights movement was going on.”

Shames didn’t initially set out to be a photojournalist, though. As a student at Berkeley, he got involved with the anti-Vietnam War protests as the movement started to gain prominence. Then, during the summer of 1966, he got his first camera and the course of his life changed.

“In 1966, the summer, I hitchhiked across the country and ended up in the East Village at a crash pad, and I had a little bit of money and I went to a pawn shop and bought a little camera,” Shames recalled. “It may have been a Pentax. I started taking pictures and… everything clicked. I realized that was a way I could express myself. You know, I could never draw, and as I said, I always at some level wanted to be an artist. With the camera, I realized that I actually could express myself.”

Stephen Shames1969 – Berkeley, California, USA: Police hit a demonstrator on the head during a protest in People’s Park. Students built a park on university land, and police cleared the park. A demonstration which turned into a riot ensued. Police fired into the crowd, killing two people.

When Shames returned to Berkeley that fall, he used that same camera to capture what was happening around him. It started with photographing “police beating people up” during the protests, and then he moved on to taking photos of the peace march against the Vietnam War in San Francisco in 1967. Through that, and the connection of a friend, Shames started “stringing” (or freelancing) for the Associated Press. At the same time, Shames was taking photos for the Berkeley Barb, one of the earliest underground newspapers to serve the civil rights, anti-war, and countercultural movements of the 1960s.

He also spent some time in Berkeley’s Student Senate, but he quickly realized that government, even in student form, wasn’t for him.

“I couldn’t stand all the bickering in politics,” Shames said. “I don’t care if you’re right wing or middle-of-the-road or you think you’re a revolutionary. All these people have egos and they’re all competing with each other and bickering about all this stuff. I was always kind of a guy who saw the big picture… I’m not a politician type.”

As Shames put it, he realized that the best path forward for him would not be in politics, but rather as an “artist of the revolution.” And so, early on in his career, Shames established himself as the primary photographic documentarian of the Black Panther Party.

Photographing The Black Panthers And The Civil Rights Movement

By the time Stephen Shames was in his junior and senior years of college, Berkeley’s campus was effectively shut down. Student strikes had taken over, and Shames was out, as always, with his camera. By now, he was stringing for the Associated Press regularly, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Before he even graduated, he was basically working as a full-time photojournalist.

Eventually, his photographs caught the attention of Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, who Shames is still friends with to this day. Of course, being associated with the Black Panthers at the time also meant you had caught the attention of the FBI.

Stephen Shames1968 – Oakland, California, USA: Panthers stand just off stage at a Free Huey rally in DeFremery Park. Cle Brooks (arms folded) was a San Francisco Panther who went to San Quentin Prison and started the San Quentin chapter of the Black Panther Party.

“I really didn’t have that much trouble,” Shames said, though he knew he was being monitored. “I knew that the government was watching us… but I found out 40 years later that one of the photographers in the Barb darkroom that five of us shared was an FBI informant.”

While the FBI might not have caused any trouble for Shames, that didn’t mean he didn’t find it elsewhere. During one protest at People’s Park, after James Rector was killed by police, Shames and other journalists had their press passes taken from them and were told to leave. Thankfully, Shames’ connections at the Associated Press — in particular, head photographer Sam Houston — stood by him and threatened Berkeley police that if their passes weren’t returned, they’d send 20 staffers down to run front-page stories about Berkeley police every day.

As Houston scolded the police chief over the phone, Shames recalled him saying something along the lines of this: “How long do you think you’re going to keep your job, you stupid sh*t?” In the end, the press passes were returned shortly after the conversation.

“That’s what was different back then,” Shames said. “Back then, someone like Sam Houston, who probably thought we were a bunch of hippie communists, with long hair and — Berkeley students — but he still stood up for us because we were working for the Associated Press and he knew we were honest and our pictures were honest.”

It was that honesty that made Shames such a pivotal figure with the Black Panther Party. The Nixon administration had been particularly worried about the Black Panthers, working hard to paint them as dangerous. Shames said the administration also appealed to “the racism of Southern whites,” while painting the press as untrustworthy.

“The Republican Party since Nixon has been running against the Black Panthers, the left movement, and the progressive movement,” Shames said. “[Bob] Haldeman said, like 20 years later, that the real reason for the War on Drugs was basically to destroy the left hippie movement and the Black movement. Not just the Panthers, but Martin Luther King and everybody who was trying to promote racial justice in the United States, and that it basically succeeded. They just put millions of young Black men in prison.”

Stephen Shames later published three books of photography about the Black Panthers: The Black Panthers, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (co-authored with Bobby Seale), and Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party. But while this work came to define his early photography, Shames would also spend much of his career focusing on other societal issues — especially child poverty.

Capturing The Tragedy Of Child Poverty — And Searching For Solutions

Stephen Shames’ work on child poverty began around 1984, when he was working for the Los Angeles Times. Surprisingly, the first steps on this sad journey led him to the “Happiest Place on Earth” — Disneyland.

“Disneyland was kind of the all-American vision, you know?” Shames said. “But who was cleaning the toilets and making the beds and working in the kitchens of Disneyland were undocumented people. And I thought that was kind of a symbol of the whole country.”

Stephen Shames1983 – The Bronx, New York, New York, USA: A friend helps fifteen-year-old Del shoot heroin on the roof. Del has lived in an abandoned building since his mom died when he was thirteen.

From there, Shames traveled around the country. He went to the Bronx in New York, then to South Carolina, capturing the experiences of impoverished children, both Black and white, in cities and in rural areas. After his initial run of taking photos, he received an Alicia Patterson Foundation grant, which allowed him to take a year and travel around even more, photographing homeless families and children living in poverty. He started in California, then made his way through Iowa during its farm crisis, to Chicago, to Hartford, and then back to New York.

The work ultimately earned him the Kodak Crystal Eagle Award, presented to him by Tipper Gore. It also caught the attention of a grant officer from the Ford Foundation, who asked Shames what his next project would be. When he told them that he intended to focus on solutions to child poverty, the grant officer said the foundation was focusing on the same thing — and invited Shames to join them.

Shames and his research assistant — who was also his ex-wife, he mentioned — got to work trying to find concrete solutions, looking through about 200 programs and narrowing it down to 30 that could actually make a difference. He presented an 80-page proposal for his work and a $50,000 budget. To his surprise, the Foundation felt that the budget was too small and they worried that if he wasn’t making enough money, he’d give up on the project before he was done.

Stephen ShamesSummer, 1990 – The Bronx, New York, USA: Early in the morning, a 10-year-old boy sleeps on the fire escape, where he slept all night to escape the heat.

“A light bulb went on,” Shames recalled. “I looked at him, said, ‘So what you’re saying is I didn’t ask you for enough money. I really need to make a much bigger budget to cover the whole project.’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Okay, I can live with that.’ And everyone in the room laughed.”

With the funding secured, Shames spent another two years on the road documenting poor communities and looking for effective solutions to address poverty. That eventually led to another project focusing on how important fatherhood is in low-income communities, and to his book Pursuing the Dream, which he said “kind of presented a roadmap for how the United States could actually eliminate child poverty.”

Pursuing the Dream received endorsements from President Jimmy Carter, General Colin Powell, and Edward Kennedy, among other public figures, and President Ronald Reagan even came to the opening exhibit — even though, Shames said, “I could tell he hated us.”

Stephen Shames’ Reflections On Photography, Journalism, And The Modern Media Landscape

With a new collection covering his whole career put together, Stephen Shames also reflected on how photography and journalism have impacted cultural change — and how the media itself has changed.

“You know, things change and maybe they’ll change back,” Shames said of the evolving media landscape. “The good news is that, at a relatively low cost, any one of us can make our own media. The problem is getting people to follow it and to watch it. That generally takes a lot of money… maybe at some point things will open up enough that regular people will be able to communicate, not have it controlled by a few people. But that doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen anytime soon.”

Stephen Shames1971 – Belfast, Northern Ireland: Boys throw rocks at a British armored van.

The modern media landscape has, of course, also been heavily disrupted by the widespread introduction of AI tools, which has also raised concerns about the validity of photographs found online. As helpful as photography has been in documenting certain issues, there’s no doubt that, going forward, people will be more skeptical of what they see. That’s why, according to Shames, there are two important elements of any good journalistic photo: humanity and context.

“Our social and racial prejudices determine how we look at things and whether we’re solving problems and how we’re solving problems,” he said. “That’s part of my work. And one of the reasons it’s so important for artists and photographers to portray all people and show their humanity is that, now with the climate crisis, we’re realizing we’re all in this together and the whole planet is going to live and die together.”

Shames’ new book is a retrospective showcase of his approach to photography, and in a broader sense, a showcase of his approach to life. It is also, notably, non-linear in its timeline, an intentional choice meant to illustrate how the events of the past still impact the world today.

“I really wanted the book to be like a daydream sequence because that’s how I see reality,” Shames said. “I didn’t want it to be a scholarly book or a chronological book that went year by year, because that isn’t how I see things… The past and the future is always present… I want the book to be like our thoughts. I don’t think anyone just thinks linearly.”

That non-linear thinking is in direct opposition to how people are taught to think about history, however, Shames added. When learning history, facts, not feelings, are often considered to be most important, but Shames believes that photography is able to show both. A good photo can capture the reality of a moment — and evoke genuine emotion.

“What I love about photography is that photography is able to get beyond rationality and really get to people all over the world,” he reflected. “And what’s really interesting, when I feel I’ve done a good job, is when the people I’m photographing look at the picture and go, ‘Yeah, that’s my life. That’s really true. You’ve really got it.’ When I’m able to do that, then I feel, this is the story… a good photograph, if it has emotion in it, really is able to provoke people’s emotions.”

After this look back into the past through Stephen Shames’ photography, check out our gallery of photos from 1970s Harlem. Then, learn all about the Great Depression’s forgotten Black victims.