Shmuel Thaler

Website:

www.shmuelthaler.com s
hmuel_thaler@yahoo.com 

Biography:

The 2016 Santa Cruz County Artist of the year, Shmuel Thaler has been a staff photographer at the Santa Cruz Sentinel since 1987. His photographs have been published in every leading newspaper in the United States, as well as in numerous magazines including Time, Forbes and Business Week, and viewed on the CBS Evening News, 48 Hours and NBC Nightly News. Shmuel received his BFA from the film school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his photographs illustrate numerous books including his collaboration with the late Santa Cruz author George Levenson on ‘Bread Comes to Life’ and the classic ‘Pumpkin Circle’, which has more than 120,000 copies in print and is held by most library systems in the country. Shmuel has been honored three times with awards in the prestigious National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism contest, and he was recognized with an Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010 by the Aptos Chamber of Commerce to recognize the contribution his photography has had in the community. Shmuel has been the volunteer staff photographer for eight Mount Madonna School Values in World Thought learning journeys to India and South Africa including documenting conversations with Nobel Laureates His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Shmuel has also volunteered as a staff photographer for the Santa Cruz Shakespeare festival every year since 1984 as well as for numerous non-profits and NGOs. 

Thaler spent much of 2020 documenting the Black Lives Matter actions, the election, the CZU August Lightning Complex fires and the pandemic for the Sentinel.  His photograph of Santa Cruz Police Chief Andy Mills and Mayor Justin Cummings taking a knee side-by-side went viral and aired on every major TV network and shared on social media by Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Katie Couric and George Conway and thousands of others and was seen by millions.