MEDIA BIO

Jeff Schwartz spent fifty years behind the camera, filming presidents, celebrities, athletes, and everyday people whose stories rarely made the broadcast. His work has taken him from movie sets and Super Bowls to homeless shelters and prison yards. Schwartz is the founder of Primalux Media and the author of The Cameraman in Clogs: Always Rolling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I never planned to become a cameraman. I was twenty-two with no idea what to do with my life. In 1976, I stumbled into the business just as video was replacing film, and the industry suddenly needed bodies.

Fifty years later, I had filmed five U.S. presidents, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and Cher. I worked on movie sets and covered the Olympics and Super Bowls. The job carried me across the country and around the world, from the Canadian Rockies to the Australian Outback.

But the work I'm proudest of is twenty-five years of documentaries about everyday people doing extraordinary things: veterans learning to surf with prosthetic legs, prisoners training guide dogs, doctors making house calls to the homeless. Stories about people society had stopped seeing.

I started my career shooting weddings and bar mitzvahs in a cheap black tuxedo. Later, I built a production company called Primalux with three other videographers. After an Achilles injury, the open-backed clogs I wore became my signature. People began calling me “The Cameraman in Clogs.”

In 2025, after fifty years behind the lens, I retired.

Fifty years of access to worlds most people never see. But I had spent so long capturing everyone else’s moments that I had missed too many of my own.

Now my time is finally mine.

I live in New York with my wife, and close to our daughters and two granddaughters, who taught me that you can't hug someone with a camera between you.

This memoir is what I saw from behind the lens and what I learned when I finally put the camera down.