Jerry Schatzberg

Schatzberg was born to a Jewish family of furriers and grew up in the Bronx.^[3]

Schatzberg began his photography career as an assistant to photographer William "Bill" Helburn.^[4] He also studied under designer and photographer Alexey Brodovich alongside Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.^[5] At age 28 he left Helburn to start his own photography studio.^[6] As a fashion photographer, he photographed for magazines such as Vogue, Esquire and McCalls.^[7]

As a still photographer, among Schatzberg's most famous images were the cover photo of the Bob Dylan album Blonde on Blonde, released in 1966,^[8] and for The Rolling Stones record sleeves. A collection of Schatzberg's images of Dylan was published by Genesis Publications in 2006, titled Thin Wild Mercury.^[7]

He made his debut as a feature film director with 1970's Puzzle of a Downfall Child starring Faye Dunaway.^[9] He went on to direct films such as The Panic in Needle Park, which starred Al Pacino in 1971, Scarecrow,^[10] which shared the grand prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival,^[11] The Seduction of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep,^[12][13] Honeysuckle Rose with Willie Nelson and Dyan Cannon, Misunderstood (based on a novel by Florence Montgomery) starring Gene Hackman, No Small Affair starring Demi Moore, and Street Smart in 1987, which earned Morgan Freeman his first Oscar nomination.^[14][15][16]

He was a member of the jury at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.^[17]

In 2013, he was developing a Scarecrow sequel with writer Seth Cohen that was not made.^[18]

In 2021, Schatzberg revealed his intentions to make one last film, admitting that he "[doesn't] know what it is yet." He sought out and was considering adapting Atticus Lish's novel The War for Gloria.^[19]

Schatzberg was divorced in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in 1968 following eleven years of separation from wife Corinne, who had refused to end the marriage after having lived together for five years.^[20] The couple had two children. At the time of the divorce, Schatzberg was widely known as Faye Dunaway's fiancé,^[20][21] but Dunaway left Schatzberg for actor Marcello Mastroianni in 1968.^[22] Schatzberg's 1983 marriage to French American actress Maureen Kerwin ended in divorce in 1998.