Documentary To Premiere On John Shearer, Brilliant Photographer Who Captured Funerals Of JFK And MLK Jr., Attica Uprising And More
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- John Shearer: American Moments, a short documentary directed by James Spione, will world premiere July 30 at Newport's Rough Point (Doris Duke's home) in a screening organized by newportFILM alongside the Newport Jazz Festival and Newport Restoration Foundation.
- John Shearer was only the second African American staff photographer at LIFE magazine — following Gordon Parks, who mentored him — and also worked at Look magazine, documenting the funerals of JFK and MLK Jr., the Attica uprising, the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight, and the unrest of the 1960s and 70s.
- James Spione, who lived near Shearer in the Hudson Valley, filmed the documentary over many months in the final year of Shearer's life at the upstate New York cottage where Shearer lived with his wife Marianne.
- Alison Shearer, John Shearer's daughter and a jazz saxophonist, co-produced the film and composed and performed its score; the Newport premiere will feature a live performance by the Alison Shearer Quartet.
- The film will also screen August 5 at the Rhode Island Film Festival in Providence, with a wider festival run planned for the fall, and the premiere event includes a Q&A with Alison Shearer, Spione, and Newport Jazz Festival artistic director Nate Smith.
- A release describes the documentary as a restoration of a legacy that had been "largely forgotten outside a small circle of admirers," with Spione writing that the film is shaped by "the tension between visibility and forgetting."
Why it matters: The documentary marks the first major effort to restore John Shearer to the narrative of 20th-century American photojournalism — a career mentor to Gordon Parks and shaped by Pictures-era access to Look and LIFE — using footage shot in Shearer's final year of life, turning the project into both a historical record and a daughter's collaborative tribute via her original score and quartet performance at the Rough Point premiere.
