Art Shay

Art Shay In Swans On Movie Making And More

A film crew has been interviewing Art Shay and he wrote about their work and his memories of shooting movie stars (including Elizabeth Taylor, left) and more in this essay -- Rare Medium -- for Swans:

At first I was concerned about what the filmmakers will do to my book and Algren -- thinking what the hell, Algren died in 1981 and my nude picture of his lover, Simone de Beauvoir, wasn't a magazine cover until recently -- I now realize that I may be in the middle of a maelstrom. Who knows where cinematography will take my work in its quest for Fellini-like actuality?

Click to go to the Swans site.

"You can't shoot that"

Art Shay talks about his first published photos in this recent Evanston Review Q&A: "My first published picture was of a mid-air collision in England in '44, when I was coming back from a mission. The sky was full of planes and I just pointed the Leica up and all of a sudden, two of the planes hit. I had about 10 shots left on the Leica roll and I kept shooting -- shoot, wind, shoot, wind -- as they came down with the plumes of smoke, with this colonel pulling at me, saying, "You can't shoot that, lieutenant, it's restricted." I kept moving away, shooting the (expletive) pictures. Anyway, they ended up in Look."