Frank Stewart’s Portraits of The American Journey – A Story of Jazz And Justice

“Just how somebody in photographs can treat black people with dignity. That I’d never seen before”
– Frank Stewart

 

Frank Stewart (born 1949) was 14 when he took his trained his Kodak Brownie on the March on Washington for Jobs in Freedom, otherwise known as the Great March in 1963. But it was music that truly grabbed him, becoming the focus of his lens. Stewart, who grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, recalled, “The radio was on all the time”,with Sundays devoted to Gospel, and weekdays given over to rhythm and blues.

A chance to develop his twin passions for photography and jazz arrived when he accompanied musician Phineas Newborn Jr., who his mother Dorothy would marry, to New York City’s famous jazz clubs. Newborn, who worked with the likes of musicians Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus and B.B. King, took photographs as he went, showing his slides to his stepson,

 

In 1969, Stewart moved to New York City, where me met Roy DeCarava, whose groundbreaking 1955 collaboration with poet Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, reimagined the landscape of photo book publishing. DeCarava supported Stewart’s application to The Cooper Union, where he earned a BFA in photography, graduating in 1975.

 

Stewart went on to be a concert and on-set photographer, assisting and driving the jazz bands he photographed. In 1975, he joined jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal on the road and became staff photographer at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the first photographer artist in residence, and taught photography courses at the museum.

The following year he met jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and forged a bond that would culminate in a three-decade collaboration with Stewart working as senior staff photographer at Jazz at Lincoln Center. His pictures are of the great names in jazz, including Miles Davis, Ellis Marsalis, Dianne Reeves, Thelonious Monk, Cassandra Wilson, Etienne Charles and Cécile McLorin Salvant.

 

In 1982, Stewart was invited to join the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black artists committed to photographing Black life. Two years later, in 1984, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Young Master Fellowship in photography and photographed the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

Since 1992, Stewart has served as the lead photographer for Jazz at the Lincoln Center. He has been the focus of many solo exhibitions and has been included in numerous group exhibitions. In 2023, Stewart’s career retrospective, Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s To the Present, was mounted in Washington, DC at the Phillips Collection.

See more of his great work in (via) Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present.

 

 

Here’s Frank discussing his work: