How Photographer Frank Stewart Captured Jazz Culture, Church Culture, and Black Life in America

CHADDS FORD, Pennsylvania – At first glance, it looks like an aerial photo of a war-torn cemetery, with charred coffins ripped from broken concrete vaults and arched marble tombstones destroyed by a bomb blast.

Then, the viewer begins to discern details: the coffins and vaults are actually parts of a keyboard. Instead of names and dates, the visible tombstones are inscribed with words like “vibrato” and “third harmonic”.

“It looks like a cemetery,” said photographer Frank Stewart.

Stewart’s ghostly photograph of a New Orleans church organ devastated by Hurricane Katrina’s floods is part of a retrospective of his decades-long career documenting black life in America and exploring African and Caribbean cultures.

“Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present,” is on display at the Brandywine Museum of Art through September 22. Brandywine is the fourth and final stop in the exhibition, which was organized by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia.

“I wanted to talk about the black church and the influence it has had on culture,” Stewart said of his post-Katrina work in New Orleans. “This organ, the music and everything corresponds. Everything comes together. I just wanted to show the devastation of churches, music and culture.”

Music is central to Stewart’s practice. He was the longtime photographer for the Savannah Music Festival and for 30 years was the senior photographer for the Jazz team at the Lincoln Center Orchestra, which placed him as artistic director and Grammy Award-Winning Musician Wynton Marsalis.

“He’s like my brother,” said Stewart, whose exhibit includes “Stomping the Blues,” a 1997 photograph of Marsalis leading his orchestra offstage during a world tour of his Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz oratorio, “Blood on the Fields.”

Stewart, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Memphis, Tennessee and Chicago, has his own connections to jazz and blues. His stepfather, Phineas Newborn Jr., was a pianist who worked with musicians such as Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus and BB King.

Describing himself as a son of the “apartheid South,” Stewart was inspired by photographers such as Ernest Cole and Roy DeCarava, who were among Stewart’s instructors at New York’s Cooper Union, where Stewart received a bachelor of fine arts degree. DeCarava’s photographs of 1950s Harlem led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes in the 1955 book, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life.”

Cole, a South African photographer, won acclaim in 1967 with “House of Bondage,” the first book to inspire Stewart. He chronicled apartheid using photographs he smuggled out of the country. Cole was never able to replicate his early success and fell on hard times before dying at age 49 in New York City. A documentary about him, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

“He came to New York and was homeless in New York, so I would see him on the street and we would talk,” said Stewart, who is quick to draw a distinction between his work and Cole’s.

“I consider myself more of an artist than a documentary filmmaker,” explained Stewart, who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before enrolling at Cooper Union and was a longtime friend and collaborator of artist Romare Bearden.

That’s not to say Stewart doesn’t have journalistic instincts in his blood. He relates a work history that includes the Chicago Defender, the largest black-owned daily in the country at the time, and strings for Ebony, Essence, and Black Enterprise magazines. He recalls less fondly a short period of large-format work photographing artwork for brochures and catalogues, a task he described as “tedious”.

Despite all this, Stewart maintained an artistic approach to his work, seeking to combine pattern, color, tone and space in a visually appealing way without leaving the viewer searching for the message.

“It still has to be ‘X marks the spot,’” he explained. “It still has to be photographic. It can’t just be abstract.”

Or maybe it can. How else to explain the color and texture seen in 2002’s “Blue Car, Havana”?

“It’s all about abstract painting,” Stewart said in the wall text that accompanies the photo.

The retrospective shows how Stewart’s work evolved over time, from his earliest black-and-white photographs to his more recent prints, which feature more color.

“They are two different languages,” he said. “English would be black and white. French would be the color.

“I worked in color all the time, I just didn’t have the money to print them,” he added.

While photography can inform people about the world around them, Stewart noted that there is a gulf between the real world and photography.

“Reality is a fact and photography is another fact”, he explained. “The map is not the territory. It is just a map of the territory.”