Steve Schapiro, a photojournalist and social documentarian who bore witness to some of the most significant political and cultural moments and movements in modern American history, starting in the 1960swith the struggle for racial equality across the Jim Crow South, died on Jan. 15 at his home in Chicago. He was 87.

Over a six-decade career, Mr. Schapiro trained his camera’s eye on an astonishing array of people across the American landscape as he sought to capture the emotional heart of his subjects, whether they were narcotics users in Harlem, migrant workers in Arkansas, or movie luminaries in Hollywood.

Mr. Schapiro’s photographs have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and elsewhere. They have also been collected in books about Hollywood movie sets, including those for “The Godfather,” “Taxi Driver,” and “The Way We Were.”

“I think we are on the way to a day when cameras as we have known them will be obsolete,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2016. “We will be using just cellphones to take photos.” But he added, “I will ever believe it is the photographer who counts, not the camera.”