Documentary To Premiere On John Shearer, Brilliant Photographer Who Captured Funerals Of JFK And MLK Jr., Attica Uprising And More

EXCLUSIVE: A documentary about one of the greatest American photographers of the 20^th century is about to make its world premiere.

John Shearer: American Moments, a short film on the life and work of the late artist, is set to debut on Thursday, July 30 in Newport, RI, at a special screening organized by newportFILM, in partnership with Newport Jazz Festival and the Newport Restoration Foundation. The event, to be held at the Newport mansion of Doris Duke, will feature an exhibition of Shearer’s photographs and a performance by the Alison Shearer Quartet — led by saxophonist Alison Shearer, daughter of John Shearer. John Shearer: American Moments will screen on August 5 at the Rhode Island Film Festival in Providence, with a wider festival run in the works for the fall.

James Spione directed the film about the “groundbreaking Black photographer whose images helped shape how Americans saw some of the most defining moments of the 20th century.” A release about the film notes, “As a young staff photographer for Look and later LIFE magazine, Shearer documented history from the inside, capturing the funerals of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Attica uprising, Muhammad Ali [and Joe Frazier], and the social and political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. His work is recognized for its urgency, empathy, and lasting cultural importance.”

We have your first look at the film in the clip below. The film is produced by Alison Shearer, Jesse P. Cutler, and James Spione. Cinematography is by John Molinelli.

Shearer broke racial barriers in photography, becoming only the second African American staff photographer at LIFE magazine, following Gordon Parks – who had mentored Shearer. “From the secluded upstate New York cottage where he spent his later years in relative obscurity, Shearer looks back at an era when magazines like LIFE and Look shaped the national consciousness through photography,” reads a synopsis. The film restores the legacy of a man whose accomplishments had been “largely forgotten outside a small circle of admirers. Shot with intimate access to Shearer in the final year of his life, intercut with his unforgettable pictures, and featuring a score composed and performed by his daughter, the jazz saxophonist Alison Shearer, American Moments is a vivid account of the end of the print photojournalism era—and a soulful portrait of an unsung African American pioneer.”

Alison Shearer comments, “For someone whose images are so much part of American culture, my father’s story is fairly unknown. Producing this documentary, and especially composing and performing the music for the soundtrack, is exciting because it’s an opportunity to help tell his story, and because it’s the beginning of a new chapter in my relationship with my father – a collaborative one.”

Director James Spione lived close to John Shearer in the Hudson Valley and knew him as a neighbor before learning of his significance in the history of photography. Over many months, as Shearer’s health declined, he interviewed the artist at the home where Shearer lived with his wife, Marianne.

“What struck me most in working on this film was how quickly a career of extraordinary visibility can fade into obscurity,” Spione writes in a director’s statement. “John’s early life reads like a concentrated history of American photojournalism at its peak—mentored by Gordon Parks, guided by Arthur Rothstein and Eugene Smith, and later working alongside Parks again at LIFE Magazine. But what lingered for me was not only the access he had, but the way he carried those experiences privately for the rest of his life.”

Spione continues, “What does it mean to witness so many defining American moments—civil rights struggle, cultural transformation, political rupture—and yet find yourself almost absent from the larger narrative of that era? This film is shaped by that tension: between visibility and forgetting, between the images that defined a nation and the quiet life of the person who made them.”

The film’s world premiere in Newport (at Rough Point, the Doris Duke home), will be followed by a Q&A with Alison Shearer, James Spione, and Nate Smith, artistic director of the Newport Jazz Festival. For the musical performance by the Alison Shearer Quartet, Shearer will be joined by Kevin Bernstein on keys, Martey Kenney on bass and Ben Silashi on drums. The event, including the film’s world premiere, the musical performance, and exhibition of John Shearer prints, is curated by Nate Smith.

In the clip below, John Shearer recalls documenting the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King had pastored. He speaks of the grief of African Americans, and the fury of whites who, as Shearer reminds us, “hated King.”