Sam Shaw (1912-1999) was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and is best known for his many photographs of iconic and well-known film celebrities. However, what is less known was that he was also a true Renaissance man with interests in a wide variety of art forms such as film, music, theater, sculpture, painting, and literature. He was also active in social and political activism. 

He worked a variety of jobs in the 1940’s to support himself, the more notable ones included  being a courtroom artist and a newspaper cartoonist for both the Daily Worker and the Brooklyn Eagle. He found his true calling when he started working for Collier’s Magazine as a photojournalist and travelled throughout the United States documenting the lives of regular people living their lives in post war America.

In the 1950s, he began working in the film industry as a still photographer and shot many of the biggest celebrities and stars of the era. The more notable ones were: Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, and Woody Allen. He preferred to shoot his subjects spontaneously without superficial posing, make-up, and perfect lighting as was the standard for celebrity publicity movie stills at the time.

His images ended up appearing in many of the most important magazines of the post war era. The image he is best known for is Marilyn Monroe standing above a subway grate clutching her white dress as it gets blown upward from a passing subway train.

In the 1960s, Shaw started producing his own films. One of which was “Paris Blues,” starring Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier. He also started collaborating with his close friend John Cassevetes and ended up working on many of his films. Shaw continued shooting publicity stills for all the films that he worked on.

In addition to doing photojournalism and shooting film celebrities, he also photographed a wide variety of subject matter such as: sports, landscapes, and portraits of prominent artists, musicians, singers, theater personalities, writers, intellectuals, and sports figures. Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Joe Dimaggio, Arthur Miller, Igor Stravinsky, Irving Berlin, Tennessee Williams, Patti Smith, and Debbie Harry were all photographed by Shaw. 

His incredible six-decade career is a valuable historical record of the twentieth century and documented the well known to unknown as well as the rich and the poor and everyone in between.