SYNOPSIS

Little John Kennedy, Jr., saluting his father’s flag-draped casket. The penetrating gaze of Muhammed Ali. The stunned faces of African American women lining the street at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. The bullet-riddled windows of New York’s Attica Prison after the infamous police assault on an inmate uprising.

Before he was 25 years old, John Shearer had captured them all.

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. His work—beautiful, wrenching, vibrant, raw—bore witness to a turbulent period of civil unrest and cultural transformation, and conveyed its emotional weight to millions of Americans.