A native of Winthrop, Massachusetts, Forman graduated from Revere High School and studied photography at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology from 1965 to 1966.

After graduating, Forman became a cameraman for political campaigns before joining the Boston Herald American as a photo lab technician.

[4][5] Forman is the first photographer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography two years in a row (1976 and 1977).

In 1976, he won for the Fire Escape Collapse, and the next year, he became co-winner for the same award for The Soiling of Old Glory, a photograph depicting a black attorney, Ted Landsmark, being assaulted by a white male teenager, Joseph Rakes, wielding a flagpole holding the American flag as a weapon during the height of the Boston Desegregation Busing Crisis.

The following year, he was named a Nieman Fellow and was honored with the Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award from the National Press Photographers Association.