CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/18/2013

Steve Schapiro: Then and Now

"It was 7 PM on a Thursday night. I was in my loft on Lafayette Street going through recent contact sheets from the Bobby Kennedy campaign when I got the call from Life magazine.
Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot.
I needed to get to Memphis immediately.
I arrived early the next morning, April 5th. I first went to the boarding house bathroom from where the shot had been fired. I noticed a dark, ominous handprint on the wall above the bathtub in which the assailant had stood, leveling his gun on the window sill. I was sure that it was the assassin's fingerprints. That hand print was published as a full-page image the following week in Life magazine."
Featured image, "Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Flag," was made during more optimistic times, when photographer Steve Schapiro was covering Dr. King's Selma March, Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. It is one of many historical photographs—including the handprint photograph to which Schapiro refers, above—reproduced in the photographer's newly released retrospective monograph, Then and Now.