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In late 1974, Steve Schapiro was invited to photograph David Bowie in a private session in Los Angeles. Bowie concentrates on that encounter, made while its subject was moving beyond the characters and imagery that had defined his early-1970s ascent and toward another phase of self-invention. Rather than attempting a comprehensive biography, the book studies a decisive interval through the sustained attention of a single photographer.

The session was collaborative from the outset. Schapiro remembered Bowie as calm, intellectually alert, and full of ideas; their conversation ranged to the occult writings of Aleister Crowley. That exchange matters because the photographs do not merely record an established public image. They show performer and photographer working together on gestures, costumes, settings, and signs from which new images might be constructed.

The importance of the sitting became clearer over time. Photographs originating in Schapiro’s work with Bowie contributed to the visual identities of Station to Station and Low, connecting this concentrated portrait session to two distinct moments in the musician’s subsequent career. Published in 2016, the book also places the 1974 pictures near the late imagery of Blackstar and “Lazarus,” where related motifs prompted renewed attention to Bowie’s long practice of revisiting and transforming symbols.

This 104-page hardcover from powerHouse Books is valuable to a serious photography or music collection not as an encyclopedic survey, but as a focused record of image-making in progress. Schapiro had access to Bowie at a point of transition, and the resulting photographs preserve both the authority of the emerging persona and the quieter intelligence directing it. The book’s distinction lies in that tension: celebrity portraiture becomes a document of authorship, collaboration, and continual reinvention.