Steve Shapiro’s Taxi Driver: Rare Photos of Cinema History
By: Maria Popova
Taxi Driver is revered as one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces, the powers of Scorsese and DeNiro converging to create a milestone that would influence generations of filmmakers to come and forever imprint film audiences worldwide. In 1976, it was a piece of ambitious cinematic innovation, blending the noir and crime thriller genres in an unexpected way unlike any film had dared before. Today, the world gets a rare new look at the set of the iconic film in the form of Steve Schapiro, Taxi Driver — a stride-stopping 328-page volume of never-before-seen photographs by Steve Shapiro (of The Godfather Family Album fame), the special photographer on the set of Taxi Driver in 1975.
The limited-edition comes in only 1,000 copies, each numbered and signed by Shapiro himself, at $700 a piece. (Then again, we suspect serious cinema lovers and Scorsese fans would gladly give a kidney for this Taschen gem, so the pricetag may indeed be quite alright.)
With a foreword by Martin Scorsese himself and priceless images of a young De Niro, as well as a rare glimpse of a long-lost New York City, Steve Schapiro, Taxi Driver offers a priceless timecapsule of film history bound — and clamshell-boxed — to delight film buffs, New York lovers and vintage photography aficionados alike.
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