Stanley Forman

Who is Stanley Forman?

Stanley Joseph Forman was an American photojournalist who over a four-year period won a Pulitzer Prize three times while working at the Boston Herald American.

Forman studied photography at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston, 1965-1966. After graduation, he was a cameraman for a political campaign before joining the Boston Herald as a photo lab technician. He was later promoted to staff photographer.

Forman won his first two Pulitzer Prizes consecutively, the first photographer to do so. In 1976, he won in the category of "Spot News Photography" for his sequence of photographs Fire Escape Collapse showing a young woman and a two-year-old girl falling from a collapsed balcony during a local fire. The next year, he was co-winner in the same category for The Soiling of Old Glory, a photograph depicting black lawyer Ted Landsmark being assaulted by a man wielding a flagpole as a weapon during the height of anti-busing unrest in Boston. Forman's third Pulitzer Prize came in 1979 when the photography staff of the Boston Herald American won in the "Feature Photography" category for its coverage of the blizzard of 1978, although Forman was on crutches following an Achilles tendon injury during the blizzard, and so did not take any of the photographs which led to the award.