Steve Schapiro. Taxi Driver, Art Edition No. 101–200 'Jodie Foster'

By 1976, Steve Schapiro had already photographed the civil rights movement from the front lines and worked the sets of The Godfather and Chinatown. When Martin Scorsese sent Travis Bickle out into a rain-slicked, neon-soaked New York, Schapiro was the still photographer on the floor, handed the strange job of making permanent images from a film about a man coming apart. This Art Edition draws its single print from that assignment, a portrait of Jodie Foster as the child character Iris.

She was barely a teenager, and the image still unsettles.

Schapiro learned to read a moment on harder assignments than a movie set. Through the 1960s he photographed the civil rights movement up close, Selma, the March on Washington, the faces gathered around Martin Luther King, and that documentary instinct never left him. On a film set he behaved like a photojournalist who happened to be standing inside a fiction.

His on-set work belongs to a nearly vanished craft. The studio still photographer had to shadow a production and manufacture, out of the chaos of shooting, the handful of images that would sell the film and then outlive it. His Taxi Driver frames do both jobs at once: the mohawk, the finger-gun raised to the temple, De Niro rehearsing menace into a mirror, and this quieter portrait of a young actor asked to embody something no child should have to. He was not directing these moments so much as recognizing them a half-second before they closed, which is the whole difference between a set photographer and a tourist with access.

Taxi Driver was shot through a sweltering New York summer, and the pictures hold the grime of it. Schapiro caught De Niro between takes as often as during them, so the collection carries both the mythologized Travis Bickle and a young performer loosening his shoulders between setups. The line between character and person keeps blurring, which is the whole fascination.

There is professional history worth remembering here. The studio still was once a working document, feeding posters, lobby cards, and press kits, made under pressure and rarely credited as art. Schapiro's frames survived that utilitarian origin to become the images most people carry in their heads when they picture the film.

The Foster portrait rewards the slow look the rest of the set resists. In it a child actor holds an adult's wariness, the platform shoes and floppy hat doing the work of a costume while the eyes refuse the whole premise. It is the frame that pushed a set assignment toward something closer to a document of innocence under pressure.

The Art Edition turns one of those recognitions into a collectible. A signed, numbered print of Foster, paired with the larger volume of Schapiro's Taxi Driver photographs, housed for people who treat film history as something to hang rather than shelve. It is a handsome proposition and a narrow one.

Whether it justifies the outlay depends on what a buyer wants from a photograph. As a document of a landmark film and a young performer at a hinge moment, the image is close to unbeatable. As an autonomous work of art, divorced from the movie that gives it its charge, it leans hard on your feelings about the film itself.

Picture it framed in a portrait studio's back room, where a nervous young sitter waits before a session. The photograph would say, without a word, that a face caught at the right instant can carry a whole story. Then it would remind the photographer that the instant is the entire job.