Photographer's Career Captures Civil Rights and Three Pulitzers

Photographer Stanley Forman has won numerous awards, including three Pulitizer Prizes. He shares the third Pulitzer with the photography staff of the now-defunct Boston Herald American for their Blizzard of 1978 coverage. (photo: JewishJournal.org)

The following article is from JewishJournal.org. 

BEVERLY, Mass. - While the world's attention has been on the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, those who grew up during the Civil Rights era remember a time when the advent of a black nominee for President of the United States would have been unthinkable.

For 30-year-old Stanley Forman, who was to take the seminal 1976 photograph that many would say captured the essence of that tumultuous period, seeing Barack Obama on stage at the Democratic Convention last month, accepting his party's nomination, was beyond Forman's, and most people's, wildest imagination.

Forman's photograph of an enraged white teen holding the American flag like a spear, looking as though he were about to drill it into a black man who was being held by another white man on Boston's City Hall Plaza, crystallized in one searing image the complex issues around forced busing, which was enflaming the city of Boston.

The photograph ran on the front pages of newspapers across the country and shocked the nation. For that image, which took 1/250th of a second and was dubbed by his editors "The Soiling of Old Glory," he captured his second Pulitzer Prize in as many years.

For young Stanley Forman, growing up in what the locals called the "kosher canyon" of Shirley Avenue in Revere, Mass., in the 1950s and 1960s, taking black and white photographs and developing them in the cellar of his home darkroom became his passion.

Becoming a professional photographer was the best vocation in the world, he thought, as he began to climb the ladder to success.

Forman, now 63, got a career kick-start when he was taking a post-high school photography course at the Franklin Institute in Boston. As luck would have it, a man from an advertising agency came to the school looking for someone who had a darkroom and could take publicity pictures of future Senator Edward Brooke.

"It was an exciting time for a young fellow like me," Forman said. "I turned 21 during the campaign and knew nothing about politics. I just knew about taking photos. I photographed Brooke with everyone who shook his hand and there was always someone with me who wrote down their names. I must have done thousands of photos."

Forman, now of Beverly, said it was the fact that he had a darkroom that got him the job.

"My first day with Brooke, I worked from about 9 a.m. till midnight, then went home and worked in the darkroom till about 4 a.m. and brought the photos in," Forman said. "They were shocked and thrilled to see the work done so quickly and it went like that from May till November, when Brooke beat Chub Peabody by over 400,000 votes. It was very exciting."

When the campaign ended, Forman scored interviews with the three Boston dailies: the Record American, Herald Traveler and Boston Globe.

"The Herald Traveler said they could possibly hire me as a custodian and maybe work my way into the photo department. The Globe showed no interest and the Record American hired me."

That was the beginning of Forman's illustrious career beginning in 1966, during which he has garnered two Pulitzer Prizes and a third which he shares with the entire photography staff of 16 from the Boston Herald American for their coverage of the Blizzard of 1978.

Forman has also won numerous local and regional awards, including the spot news award in the Boston 

Press Photographers contest five times for still photography.
 

For a Jewish boy from Revere, the Record American had another thing going for it.

"The chief photographer was Myer Ostroff and I am sure being Jewish helped me," Forman said. "One of the managing editors was Sam Bornstein who is in his 90s, and I still correspond with him via e-mail. The head of the sports department was Sam Cohen and the head of circulation was Lester Zwick. Tommy Shulman was head of some promotion department. I believe all were Jewish, but am not positive about Zwick. It was a Jewish newspaper. Even several of the other photographers were Jewish."

One of the first stories he covered was a train wreck. He did what photographers can't do anymore - he stationed himself outside the hospital emergency room to catch dramatic shots of the injured.

Forman still recalls the great satisfaction he felt when the Record American printed his photographs, which he said "kicked butt" with those of the Herald Traveler that day, the newspaper that offered to bring him on as a custodian.

His first Pulitzer was to be awarded for an astonishing photograph he took on July 22, 1975, of a fire escape collapsing on Marlborough Street in Boston, sending a teenaged girl tumbling headlong to the ground while a two-year-old follows her in mid-air.

The photograph of the pair in free fall, with potted plants tumbling and the fire escape shown breaking away, was breathtaking. It shocked Boston and cities across the nation into passing more stringent fire-escape safety regulations.

The 19-year-old girl plunged to her death, but the child thankfully landed on top of her safely.
Forman had raced to the scene after hearing the call over the fire radio at Boston's Herald American.

Spotting an engine truck, he followed it to the Back Bay [in Boston].

At the scene, he climbed onto the bed of the ladder truck, and in the chaos of the moment, no one bothered to order him off. The girl and toddler stood on the fifth floor fire escape, trapped by the flames inside the building.

Seconds before a firefighter could pull them to safety, the fire escape collapsed.
Forman, with his motor drive on, was looking through his 135 mm lens, snapping pictures of what he thought would be a routine ladder rescue. As the fire escape broke apart, he kept shooting.

He took one last shot and looked away as the thud of the young woman hit the pavement. He went back to his office not knowing what he had captured until, on another fire assignment at 2 a.m., he stopped in a store and saw the morning paper.

His photographs took the full front page and all of page three.

After 16 years, Forman decided to get out of the newspaper field, and left the Boston Herald American, which was sold by the Hearst Corporation in 1982 and became the Boston Herald.

He got an offer and, believing that the newspaper industry was headed for a downturn, decided to stay ahead of the curve. He began working for Channel 5 as a television cameraman, using his same compositional skills and instinct for arresting images.

The work is not nearly as rewarding as seeing his name beneath a photograph on the print page, he said, but he is never without a still camera.

His dramatic photographs of a fire that destroyed a Beverly mansion in August appear on thebostonchannel.com.

As for the future of the newspaper industry today, he has a few discouraging words.

"The Internet has ruined the news business, as newspapers are not the main source of reading and TV is not the main source of viewing," said Forman. "I did read an article the other day that said most people still get their news from TV so it isn't over yet, but it is certainly harder to keep up with the flow. There are just so many sources of news. It is very competitive."

source: JewishJournal.org

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