Paul Faso, Official Photographer of the Statue of Liberty

Photographer Paul Faso was working as a paint contractor in Atlanta in the early 1970’s when a close friend and contracting partner was killed in a painting accident. Searching for a way to cope with his loss, Paul picked up a camera and began taking photographs.
                                                                             

Photographer Paul Faso in 1986 with two of his Official Limited Edition Statue of Liberty prints. (Photo provided by Paul Faso)

 “It was an emotional outlet for what happened,” he says. “I photographed everything.  What drove me was the presence of everyday life.” During the next several years, he created thousands of iconic images of Atlanta.

In 1975, Paul’s photography career took off when a friend suggested he take his work to the Library, a Buckhead disco that had a six-screen slide show on the dance floor. Paul convinced the manager to let him replace the old faded slides they had been using with his vibrant Kodachrome transparencies. He was soon traveling the country shooting slide show images for clubs from Denver to New York. 

While in Manhattan in 1977, Paul decided to photograph the Statue of Liberty in a way that hadn’t been done before. “I always shot for the slide shows in a six-screen sequence, and I wanted to do a multiple image of the Statue of Liberty,” he says. Paul spent the day on the Staten Island Ferry, traveling back and forth to Liberty Island, using a special filter on his camera’s lens that produced a multiple image on a single frame of film; he photographed the statue from endless perspectives.

Knowing he had created something special, Paul filed those images away for nearly a decade until he presented them the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation Inc., who licensed a series of the photographs as the “Official Limited Edition of the Statue of Liberty” for the 1986 Centennial Celebration. This earned Paul the title of “Official Photographer of the Statue of Liberty.”

These historic images as well as others from his archive of 250,000 film and digital works will soon be available to the public in the form of American made T-shirts, cups, and other unique items. For information, go to www. Greatamericanphotography.net.

— Dean Hesse