Jerry Schatzberg

Since the start of his career in the 1950s, Jerry Schatzberg has been capturing and portraying people from all walks of life in penetrating photographs and films. He began as a freelance photographer, working on fashion shoots and celebrity portraiture for such top publications as Vogue and Life magazine. Through sensitive, elegant black-and-white images of the artists, celebrities, thinkers, and leaders of the 1960s, he produced a portrait of an era. Schatzberg made his foray into directing in 1970, with his first feature, Puzzle of a Downfall Child. The films The Panic in Needle Park (1971) and Scarecrow (1973) followed; both focused on marginalized characters on the rough edges of American society. Unflinching and raw, these works solidified his position among the foremost American filmmakers of the 1970s, one of the richest periods of filmmaking in the country.