After six decades behind the camera, witnessing both tragedy and triumph on five continents, the photojournalist Stephen Shames has arrived at a simple truth: “There’s nothing more extraordinary than reality.”
Shames’s journey began in the 1960s at the University of California, Berkeley, where as an “artist of the struggle” he documented the anti–Vietnam War movement and the rise of Black Power. Mentored by the one and only Bobby Seale, leader of the Black Panthers, he met—and photographed—figures such as Angela Davis, and learned, as he puts it, “to see community that was not my own from the inside.”
