Flip Schulke

Flip Schulke was born Graeme Phillips Schulke,[1] and grew up in New Ulm, Minnesota.[3] His nickname "Flip" came about from his interest in gymnastics.[4][5] He graduated from Macalester College, then moved to Miami.[3]

He taught briefly at the University of Miami, then began working as a freelance photographer.[3] He worked for Life , and covered a variety of events, including the Cuban Revolution.[3]

In 1962, he visited and photographed the Berlin Wall.[4]

Schulke began photographing the civil rights movement in the American south as early as 1956.[3]

Schulke formed a bond with civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. after an all-night conversation in 1958, and began photographing him.[3][4] King invited Schulke to photograph secret planning meetings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, though not all of the activists trusted him being there.[1] He also photographed the 1963 March on Washington[1] and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March.[1] They traveled together until King's death in 1968,[6] which upset Schulke so much that he stopped covering the civil rights movement and began to work on more commercial projects.[4] In all, he took around 11,000 photographs of King, including some of his funeral.[1]

Schulke photographed Muhammad Ali,[6] Jacques Cousteau,[6] Fidel Castro[6] and John F. Kennedy.[6] He also was a photographer for the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica program in the early 1970s.[7]

Schulke died on May 15, 2008, at age 77.[3]

The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin holds 300,000 of his photographs.[4][6] His photographs are also held in a variety of museums, including the Harvard Art Museums,[8] the Cleveland Museum of Art,[9] the National Museum of American History,[10] the University of Michigan Museum of Art,[11] the Minneapolis Institute of Art,[12] and the Lehigh University Art Galleries.[13]