NEAL SLAVIN PHOTOGRAPHY

CONTACT HOME ABOUT THE ARTIST/COLLECTIONS ABOUT THE ARTIST/BIOGRAPHY & PRESS PORTUGAL WHEN TWO OR MORE BRITONS WASHINGTON POST SERIES SAUDADE e FADO STREET PHOTOGRAPHY COMMERCIAL FILMS/SAUDADE FILMS/BENSONHURST BOYS FILMS/FOCUS FILMS/JAZZ FILMS/RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT FILMS/EAB FILMS/FOCUS FEATURETTE SPIRITUALITY IN AMERICA FILMS/NEAL SLAVIN - PICTORIALIST FILMS/FOX STYLE NEWS PT 1 FILMS/FOX STYLE NEWS PT 2 PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS PRINTS FOR SALE BOOK SALES

BIOGRAPHY & PRESS

Neal Slavin is a world-respected photographer and film director. His work encompasses a professional career of over 40 years, during which he has photographed a myriad of subjects including such celebrities as Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Barbra Streisand, and Phil Collins. He was asked to create the photograph of President and Mrs. Clinton that was used for their first official White House Christmas card in 1993.

He is also known for his group portraits, which have been a significant focus throughout his career. His well-known photographic books include Portugal with an Afterword by Mary McCarthy (Lustrum Press/NY), When Two or More Are Gathered Together (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/NY) and Britons (Andre Deutsch/London & Aperture/NY).

When Two or More Are Gathered Together (Damiani Books, 2024) is a unique portrait of America and its idealistic underpinnings of individuality and liberty, memorialized in photographs from the 1970s. Originally published in 1976 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, this expanded 50th anniversary edition is edited with an essay by Kevin Moore and new group portraits taken over a span of 50 years (1974-2023).

His feature films include FOCUS, which he directed about the ravages of anti-semitism written by Arthur Miller, which stars William H. Macy and Laura Dern and features Meat Loaf and David Paymer, SAUDADE, A Love Letter to Portugal (Portrait of an artist in search of a soul), 2 short films called JAZZ, and The BENSONHURST BOYS in addition to hundreds of television commercials.

Slavin has appeared on The David Letterman show, Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt and Saturday Morning with Anthony Mason.

In 1972 Slavin and the NY Times photography critic A.D. Coleman organized the Market Diner Bash, a gathering of almost one hundred members of the New York photography community for a party at the Market Diner in which the photographers could photograph each other. Slavin took the final Group Portrait of the now iconic event. All the images were shown at New York's Underground Gallery.

His photographs are both privately and publicly collected. They are in numerous collections including the permanent collections of: Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

New York Public Library

Chase Manhattan Bank Collection

Centre Pompidou in Paris

International Center of Photography in New York

National Portrait Gallery

National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC

National Science and Media Museum in England

Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago

Slavin shows in both individual and group venues throughout the world and is represented by the Laurence Miller Gallery in New York. His work has been featured in the solo exhibition Britons at New York’s International Center of Photography and concurrently at England’s National Science and Media Museum. He has shown at the Akron Art Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, the Underground Gallery, the first gallery to be exclusively devoted to photography in New York City. He has also been honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris curated by Robert Delpire. His work has been shown at Documenta, the famous Les Rencontres D’Arles in France and at the Foto/Industria Biennale in Bologna in 2015, the Princeton Art Museum, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the de Cordova Museum and the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent solo shows were at the Laurence Miller Gallery in New York and the Telfair Museums in Georgia.

He has photographed for most of the major magazines around the world including The New York Times Magazine, The London Sunday Times Magazine, Esquire, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, Oprah Magazine, Rolling Stone, Life, Geo, and New York Magazine. His work has been featured in the online magazine Slate in its blog called Behold. It was also featured in other online magazines such as L’Oeil de la Photographie, Blind, Feature Shoot, BuzzFeed, Internazionale, Ain't Bad and It’s Nice That.

He has been awarded a Gold Lion in Cannes for print, a Silver Cube from the Art Director’s Club of New York, five Addy Awards, and a Mobius Award. He was also one of the first recipients to receive a Fulbright Fellowship in Photography. He received two CAPS grants and a US National Endowment for the Arts grant. While at Cooper Union he was awarded an exchange scholarship to study Renaissance Painting and Sculpture at Lincoln College, Oxford University. He has won numerous Communication Arts Magazine

Awards in addition to Awards from The Mead Library of Ideas. The American Society of Magazine Photographers (ASMP) named him Corporate Photographer of the Year in 1974. Slavin has been included in Esquire Magazine's article on the Ten Toughest Photographs of 1975. He has also been honored with both The Cooper Union School of Art & Architecture’s esteemed President’s Citation and the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Medal for Artistic Achievement. He was inducted into the Cooper Union Alumni Hall of Fame in January, 2011.

His teaching credentials include classes and workshops at Les Recontres d’Arles in Provence, The Cooper Union, Manhattanville College, The School of Visual Arts, The City University of New York at Queens College as well as serving as a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Chicago and teaching for several summers at the Ansel Adams Workshop in Yosemite National Park. He is teaching a new course at the International Center of Photography (ICP) entitled "Inspired By The Arts; Unlocking Your Photographic Imagination".

AFFILIATIONS:

DIRECTORS GUILD OF AMERICA (DGA)

AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY ARCHIVES GROUP (APAG)

Slavin is currently working on a new book of photographs entitled BELIEF: The Prayer Project. It is being covered by CBS Sunday Morning for a segment to be aired when completed.

More than four decades after living in Portugal as a Fulbright Fellow during the repressive Fascist regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Slavin returned to shoot a new book and produce and direct a film about the Portuguese people in contemporary society. Both have been completed and are expected to be available to the public sometime in 2026.