Steve Schapiro. Taxi Driver

The image most people carry out of Taxi Driver was never a frame of the film. It is a still. Steve Schapiro stood a few feet from the movie camera and made photographs that outlasted the footage in public memory: Travis Bickle's mohawk, the mirror, neon smearing across a wet windshield on a street that looks one degree away from catching fire.

Look at the mohawk portrait. Robert De Niro sits in half-profile, the haircut absurd and paramilitary at the same time, the eyes gone flat with a violence the plot has not yet reached. It is a production still, made on assignment to help sell a movie, and it stands on its own as a portrait of a man coming apart at the seams. The frame says more about Travis than several of his scenes manage to.

There is another, quieter one: Jodie Foster as Iris on a tenement stoop, twelve going on ancient, the city having already taken more than it will admit. Schapiro was the unit stills photographer, the person whose job is to make the poster, the press images, the frames a studio hands to the world. He had done it on The Godfather and would keep doing it for decades afterward. The Taxi Driver assignment sat in the middle of that run, and it may be the one where the material and the eye were most exactly matched.

Before Hollywood he was a serious photojournalist who covered the civil rights movement, and that reporter's eye is why his set work reads as documentary instead of publicity. The discipline is severe. He worked without being seen. Shooting silently beside a rolling camera, matching Scorsese's available-light, rain-slicked New York, finding frames in the gaps between takes and never once disturbing the scene in front of him.

The color is doing quiet work throughout. Schapiro shot the film's sodium-vapor palette straight, the reds and ambers of a Times Square that no longer exists, and the stills preserve a New York the city has since scrubbed away. That accident of timing hands the book a value beyond the production it was hired to record. It is also a street photograph of a vanished place, made from inside a taxi that was only pretending to drive. Half the frames could hang in a photography survey with no mention of the film at all.

A film set is a machine with no spare room in it, built entirely for someone else's purpose, and the stills photographer has to make lasting pictures inside it anyway. Studio photographers know that predicament in another key. You get handed a room you did not light, a subject you cannot direct, a clock you do not control, and you are still expected to leave with the definitive frame. Schapiro treats those limits as the assignment rather than the obstacle, and the pictures are a master class in that exact bind.

The limits of the book are honest ones. This is a single film, a single production, a narrow slice of a long and varied career, and part of its pull is affection for a landmark movie more than the pictures on their own. A viewer with no attachment to Scorsese's New York gets a smaller book. The Godfather album ranges wider; the civil rights reportage cuts deeper.

Still, the opening claim holds. The film runs its length and stops. The stills keep going, and that is the quiet argument the collection makes for a trade most people never notice is happening at the edge of the frame.