Steve Schapiro’s Taxi Driver returns to Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film through the privileged perspective of its special set photographer. Rather than treating the production as a sequence of familiar screen images, the book draws on hundreds of photographs from Schapiro’s archive, including previously unseen material. His camera moves between performance and production, recording the film’s most intense and violent passages while also preserving the circumstances in which its charged fictional world was constructed.

The photographs concentrate attention on Robert De Niro’s portrayal of Travis Bickle, the isolated cab driver whose transformation into an armed, unstable figure gives the film its disturbing momentum. Seen together, Schapiro’s images form a sustained photographic study of character, gesture, atmosphere, and controlled aggression. They also place the film within the tense post-Vietnam climate identified by the publication, connecting its psychological unease to a wider historical mood without reducing the work to simple social documentation.

This distinction matters: Taxi Driver is conceived not merely as a repository of film stills, but as a photobook with its own cumulative rhythm. The archival breadth allows individual moments to register beyond their function in the finished movie. Schapiro’s position on set offers proximity to actors and scenes, while the extended selection reveals how photographic observation can reinterpret a work made for cinema. A foreword by Scorsese adds the director’s presence to that exchange between film and still photography.

Published by TASCHEN in 2013, this standard hardcover edition presents text in German, English, and French. Its substantial large format gives the photographs an appropriately expansive setting. For collectors of photography and film history, the book merits attention for the coherence of its archival selection and for Schapiro’s unusual dual role: documenting a major production while creating an autonomous photographic account of its characters, tensions, and historical atmosphere.