Frank Stewart photos captured culture of jazz, church and Black life in US

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

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

"It looks like a graveyard," photographer Frank Stewart said.

Stewart's ghostly photograph of a New Orleans church organ ravaged by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina is part of a career retrospective of his decades 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 Sept. 22. Brandywine is the fourth and final stop for 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 what influence they had on the culture," Stewart said of his post-Katrina work in New Orleans. "This organ, the music and everything corresponds. It all comes together. I just wanted to show the devastation of churches and the music and the culture."

Music is elemental to Stewart's practice. He was the long-time photographer for the Savannah Music Festival, and for 30 years he was the senior staff photographer for Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which paired him with artistic director and Grammy-winning musician Wynton Marsalis.

"He's like my brother," said Stewart, whose exhibition includes "Stomping the Blues," a 1997 photograph of Marsalis leading his orchestra off the stage during a world tour of his Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz oratorio "Blood on the Fields."

Stewart, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, has his own ties to jazz and blues. His stepfather, Phineas Newborn Jr., was a pianist who worked with the likes of musicians Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus and B.B. King.

Describing himself as a child of the "apartheid South," Stewart has drawn inspiration from photographers such as Ernest Cole and Roy DeCarava, who was 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 on the 1955 book, "The Sweet Flypaper of Life."

Cole, a South African photographer, achieved acclaim in 1967 with "House of Bondage," the first book to inspire Stewart. It 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 he 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 an artist more than a documentarian," 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 recounts a work history that includes the Chicago Defender, the largest Black-owned daily in the country at the time, and stringing for Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise magazines. He looks back less fondly on a short stint of large-format work photographing fine art for brochures and catalogs, an undertaking he described as "tedious."

Through it all though, Stewart has maintained an artistic approach to his work, looking to combine pattern, color, tone and space in a visually appealing manner while not leaving the viewer searching for the message.

"It has to still be 'X marks the spot,'" he explained. "It still has to be photographic. It can't be just abstract."

Or maybe it can. How else to explain the color and texture seen in "Blue Car, Havana" from 2002?

"It's all about abstract painting," Stewart said in wall text accompanying the photo.

The retrospective shines a light on how Stewart's work has evolved over time, from early black-and-white photographs to his more recent prints, which feature more color.

"It's two different languages," he said. "English would be the black and white. French would be the color."

"I worked in color the whole time, I just didn't have the money to print them," he added.

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

"Reality is a fact, and a photograph is another fact," he explained. "The map is not the territory. It's just a map of the territory."