Frank Stewart’s epic portrait of Black culture & community

A new, travelling exhibition charts the photographer’s extraordinary journey over the past six decades.

Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, photographer Frank Stewart travelled between family in Memphis, Chicago, and New York, developing a keen sensitivity to the regional inflections of Black American life.

“That was really the beginning of his peripatetic life. In many ways, I think Frank is most comfortable either in a jazz show or in the car going someplace,” says Ruth Fine, curator of the traveling exhibition and catalogue, Frank Stewart's Nexus: An American Photographer's Journey, 1960s to the Present.

Frank Stewart's Nexus charts the photographer’s extraordinary journey over the past six decades. Although Stewart made his first photographs at 14, when he accompanied his mother Dotty to the historic March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs in August 1963, his story begins in the blues, gospel, and jazz — the soul of Black America.

As a youth, he accompanied musician Phineas Newborn Jr., who Dotty would later marry, to New York’s legendary jazz clubs. When Newborn was on the road, he photographed in colour, and showed the slides at home, introducing Stewart to his lifelong passions: jazz and photography.

In 1969, Stewart made New York his home base, and got know photographer Roy DeCarava, whose groundbreaking 1955 collaboration with poet Langston Hughes — The Sweet Flypaper of Life — reimagined the landscape of photo book publishing.

Recognising a kindred spirit, DeCarava supported Stewart’s application to The Cooper Union. Here Stewart met artist and educator George Nelson Preston, who encouraged him to pursue a six-month independent study program in seven countries across West Africa in 1974.

Top to bottom:Left to right: Clock of the Earth, Mamfe Ghana, 1998; Radio Players Series on bus 1978

After graduating in 1975, Stewart hit the road with jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal, while also working as staff photographer for the Studio Museum in Harlem. 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.

“Up to that point, Frank was looking for, documenting and conveying the origins of the African American experience,” Fine says. “Once he started traveling around the world with the orchestra, he found himself in places like China where there was no African American experience so he had to shift what he was looking for.”

It was then that Stewart’s formative relationships with artists Jack Whitten and Romare Bearden came into play, guiding him toward formal issues of photography like composition, light, shape, and color. “That's about the time when he shifted to digital,” says Fine, pointing to Stewart’s continuous experimentation across the medium.

“He keeps adding things, but he doesn't detract anything. His interests expand, his body of friends expands, and nobody gets lost,” she continues. “He likes to speak with people and has an ability to meet someone for the first time and gain their trust because they sense he is sincere and has a deep interest in them.”