NEAL SLAVIN

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 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).

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 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the New York Public Library, the Chase Manhattan Bank Collection, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Biblioteque in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, the National Science and Media Museum in England, and the 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.

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".

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