Rowland Scherman
Rowland Scherman (born April 30, 1937 in Westchester County, New York) is a photographer.
Scherman is the son of Newsweek vice president Bill Scherman and the former Germaine Ganteaume, and the nephew of photojournalist David Scherman. He grew up in Pelham, New York and finished high school at The Gunnery in Washington, Connecticut in 1955. He attended New York University for a year, and then enrolled as an art student at Oberlin College in Ohio, but left to join the U.S. Army. He began his career as a darkroom apprentice at LIFE magazine in 1957 while also pursuing music. He recorded a few singles at Coed Records as Billy Donahue and scored a minor hit with "Oo Darling", which he performed on "American Bandstand" in 1959.
In 1961 Scherman was hired as the first official photographer for the U.S. Peace Corps. He began working freelance in 1963, taking high-profile assignments from news organizations. One of his first assignments was to document the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for the U.S. Information Agency. His November 28, 1965 photograph of Bob Dylan in concert in Washington D.C. was used as the cover of Dylan's 1967 "Greatest Hits" album, and won a Grammy Award for "Best Album Cover, Photography." Scherman did not attend the awards ceremony and when he received his Grammy statuette it was in two pieced and had his name misspelled. He sent it back to the Academy and never got a response.
Scherman moved to London, England in 1970, and from there to Wales, where he spent some time meditating and herding sheep. In 1980 he and his wife, Joyce moved to Birmingham. In 1983 they opened Joe, a bar, in the Studio Building at Five Points Circle. He leased the iconic neon sign from former bookstore owner Joe Simpson. The bar was known for its then-unusual selection of imported beers and pub games, for the piped-in jazz music, and for roast beef sandwiches and seasonal specials. He sold the business in 1984.
Scherman took local portrait and commercial commissions. His photographs were exhibited and sold locally at Gerry Mitchell's Almost Famous gallery and design shop in the Ware Building at Five Points South in the 1980s, and later at the 1024 Gallery at Pepper Place and the Lyda Rose Gallery in Homewood.
Scherman moved from the Forest Court Apartments on Highland Avenue to John Cooper's former home and studio in the Ramsey Mercantile building in Irondale in the 1990s.
Scherman relocated to Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 2000. In 2013 Scherman's work was the subject of a documentary feature Eye on the 60s: The Iconic Photography of Rowland Scherman which was directed by Chris Szwedo and aired on PBS.
In 2018 he was invited by archivist Robert S. Cox of the Special Collections department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was interesting in preserving, digitizing and cataloguing his photograph collection. He and his partner Linda Calmes Jones moved to Amherst, where he was planning to teach a course, which was canceled due to the COVID pandemic. Cox died in 2020, and the collection is held at what is now called the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center in his honor. Scherman moved back to Cape Cod in 2022.
Publications
- Rowland Scherman (1992) Elvis is Everywhere. Three Rivers Press. ISBN 9780517586051
- Rowland Scherman (2008) Love Letters. Blurb. ISBN 9781389651694
- Rowland Scherman, Michael E. Jones & Christine Jones (2014) Timeless: Photography of Rowland Scherman. Cape Cod Museum of Art / Peter E. Randall Publisher ISBN 9781931807234
References
- Kemp, Kathy (May 7, 1997) "[ Prints charming: Photographer and legend Rowland Scherman shoots and scores]." Birmingham Post-Herald, p. 1C
- Seale, Kathy (May 12, 1999) "Irondale's historic district blooming as artists move in." The Birmingham News, p. 5S
- Greiner-Ferris, John (May 11, 2022) "Rowland Scherman Focused on Hope, Not Darkness." The Provincetown Independent
- "Rowland Scherman ’55 and His Life Behind the Lens." (Fall 2022) The Frederick Gunn School Bulletin
External links
- Rowland Scherman website
- Eye on the 60s at szwedo.com
- Rowland Scherman Collection at library.umass.edu