“The great thing about being a photojournalist is your camera is a ticket to go anywhere,” says photographer Stephen Shames. “I try to convey pure emotion in my pictures, to get behind the scenes, to find a different angle so my pictures reveal what is beneath the surface. Having a distinct vision allows a photographer to be more poetic. Trust your vision. Go where it takes you.”
Stephen Shames has seen a lot in his more than a five-decade career. He has covered everything from the Black Panthers, to child poverty, to political leaders, and everything in between from all corners of the world. Published by Kehrer Verlag, Stephen Shames: A Lifetime in Photography presents a comprehensive collection of Shame’s work, as well as an eponymous exhibition at the renowned Visa pour l’image festival in Perpignan, France. Both contain not just iconic photographs from his career but also many that were previously unpublished.
Stephen Shames’ career began when he was a student at the University of California, Berkley in 1967. He bought a used camera from a pawn shop. This simple purchase—a small Pentax, he recalls—kindled in him the desire to become a photographer. His father had come for a visit from Los Angeles, and the two of them were marching through the streets of San Francisco during the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Shames’ eye caught Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in their leather jackets selling Mao’s Red Book, and their confidence and charisma drew him in. He took one frame, and eventually showed them a print, and he was in.
“I started hanging out with the Panthers, attending their rallies. Bobby Seale became my mentor and friend. He introduced me to David and June Hilliard, Big Man, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, Emory Douglas, and his brother John Seale,” Shames recalls. “I was granted incredible access. Over the next seven years, culminating in Bobby Seale’s 1973 campaign for mayor of Oakland, I documented this group of young men and women, who were at the forefront of the Black Power Movement and who became the vanguard of the revolution that was sweeping America.”
During his early years with the Black Panthers, Stephen Shames was not only a privileged witness; he also became a traveling companion. In 1970, while photographing Huey Newton upon his return from prison, he was the only photographer allowed in the room. This closeness earned him rare trust, but also dangerous situations. During a protest, he was arrested by the police and briefly detained, his camera confiscated. Shames recounts how he constantly had to juggle his role as a documentarian with the perception of the authorities, who saw him as an activist.
While Shames’ work with the Black Panthers is probably his most well-known work and has been published in numerous books over the years, it is not all that he has done. And there has been a specific theme that has underlined much of it.
“Although I photographed many diverse subjects and people from countless cultures, there is a thread connecting my pictures,” Shames explains. “Much of my photography is about children in distress with a focus on identity and family: what tears us apart and binds us together—violence and abuse, but also sensuality, love, hope, and transcendence.”
Through Marty Roysher, a college roommate and who was on the steering committee of the Free Speech Movement, he met Marian Wright Edelman. Edelman was the President of the Children’s Defense Fund at the time, the premier advocacy organization working as a voice for children. “I met with her, and she told me about the more than 12 million American children living in poverty. They constitute one half of all poor people in America. I decided to document the poor children in the United States,” tells Stephen Shames. “This became my first published book, Outside the Dream: Child Poverty in America.” The story of children on the fringes of the “American dream.
While working on his project, he met a little girl living in a car with her mother in the Midwest. Rather than limiting himself to the raw image of poverty, Shames took the time to return, to learn their name, their story. This human approach, he says, is at the heart of his photography: establishing a connection before taking photographs. This image would become one of the most striking in the book, used by the Children’s Defense Fund to raise awareness among American politicians. Later, he would continue this work by photographing children “outside the dream” around the world, particularly in Africa.
In the 1990s, when he traveled to Uganda to document the impact of AIDS on orphans, he was struck by the dignity of the children he photographed. When a journalist asked him how he endured so much pain, he replied: “What I remember is not the misery, but the resilience. These children laughed, played, invented games despite everything.” This ability to capture not only suffering but also the quiet joy, courage, and beauty of everyday life has become one of Stephen Shames’s signatures.
Shames has since published 11 monographs of his work, has won numerous awards, and has had his work underwritten by the likes of The Ford Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott, Robert Wood Johnson, and Annie E. Casey Foundations. But this is the first retrospective of his work bringing it all together.
The book itself is beautifully printed, with the photographs printed as double page spreads for horizontal photographs, and full-page bleeds for vertical ones. Combined with the size of the book, it allows one to really study the photographs in front of you. Interestingly, the work is also not presented chronologically. Rather it jumps in time, and between subjects. The photographs flow together in a daydream like way, as in how memories come back to you.
Presented from August 30 to September 14, 2025, at the Visa pour l’image festival in Perpignan, the eponymous exhibition was received with emotion. The organization praises the human intensity of its images, from the Panthers to child poverty, highlighting “Shames’ ability to reveal the profound truths behind major collective issues.”
“I think most people remember in this way when they are thinking about things. Images pop up as we recall things from our lives, not in chronological order but one image leads to another,” Shames explains. “The book is organized around images that flow from one to the next in the same way we recall our lives. The images work together to create a lifetime in photography in dream-like sequences.”
A lot has changed in the world of photography and photojournalism since Shames began back in 1967. It has always been a hard profession, but it has gotten harder. Access is much more complicated. Jobs are fewer. And there are fewer outlets that show long form photography. All of this makes it much harder to make a living just doing this type of work for the younger generation. But there are ways to survive and still do important work.
“My advice is to only embark on a photography career if you would literally die if you could not take photos because it is a hard road emotionally and financially,” Stephen Shames explains. “Do another well-paying job and be an amateur photographer. For those who have to be photographers you need to find ways to make money. Magazines and newspapers are not giving assignments to many. Photographers have turned to NGOs and nonprofits who need photos to raise money. Others do commercial work and then do their projects on their own.”
Looking back at his career, Stephen Shames has also learned some important lessons through his work around the world. “The most important lesson for me is to try to understand the community you are photographing. To look with fresh eyes and to believe what you experience even when, especially when, it goes against your preconceived notions. We all live in a cultural and family bubble. The idea is to get out of your bubble and see things with new eyes.”
Stephen Shames: A Lifetime in Photography is published by Kehrer Verlag and can be purchased through for 55€ here. The eponymous exhibition is on view until September 14, 2025 at Visa pour l’image in Perpignan, France.
More about Stephen Shames can be found on his website.
