Jazz, Church, and Black Life

CHADDS FORD, Pa. (AP) — At first glance, it looks like an aerial photo of a war-ravaged cemetery, with charred coffins torn from shattered concrete vaults and arched marble headstones flattened by a bomb blast.

Then the viewer begins to note the main points: the coffins and vaults are literally parts of a keyboard. Instead of names and dates, words like “vibrato” and “third harmonic” are carved on the apparent gravestones.

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

Stewart’s haunting photograph of a New Orleans church organ that was destroyed by floods brought on by Hurricane Katrina is a component of a retrospective of his profession, which spans a long time of 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 view on the Brandywine Museum of Art through September 22. Brandywine is the fourth and final stop within the exhibition 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 impact it had on the culture,” Stewart said of his work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “The organ, the music, everything else fits together. It all comes together. I just wanted to show the devastation of the churches, the music, the culture.”

Music is an integral a part of Stewart’s practice, and he was a longtime photographer for the Savannah Music Festival and for 30 years the senior photographer for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, where he worked with artistic director and Grammy Award-winning musician Wynton Marsalis.

“He’s like a brother to me,” said Stewart, whose exhibit includes “Stomping the Blues,” a 1997 photograph of Marsalis leading his orchestra from 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 raised in Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, has his own ties to jazz and blues. His stepfather, Phineas Newborn Jr., was a pianist who worked with musicians resembling Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus and B.B. King.

Describing himself as a toddler of the “apartheid South,” Stewart drew inspiration from photographers resembling Ernest Cole and Roy DeCarava, who was one in all Stewart’s instructors at New York’s Cooper Union, where Stewart earned a bachelor of nice arts degree. DeCarava’s photographs of Nineteen Fifties Harlem led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes on the 1955 book The Sweet Flypaper of Life.

Cole, a South African photographer, first gained recognition in 1967 with “House of Bondage,” Stewart’s first book, which chronicled the apartheid era using images smuggled in a foreign country. Cole never managed to copy his early success and fell on hard times before he died in New York at age 49. A documentary about him, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” premiered at this 12 months’s Cannes Film Festival.

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

“I consider myself more of an artist than a documentarian,” explained Stewart, who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before moving on to Cooper Union and was a longtime friend and collaborator with artist Romare Bearden.

That’s to not say Stewart doesn’t have journalistic instincts in his blood. He tells the story of a job that included the Chicago Defender, the biggest black-owned every day within the country on the time, and stints with Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise magazines. He’s less keen on a temporary stint in large format, photographing art for brochures and catalogs, which he describes as “boring.”

Despite all this, Stewart has maintained a creative approach to his work, searching for to mix patterns, colors, tones and space in a visually appealing way while never leaving the viewer without discerning 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 perhaps. How else to clarify the colour and texture seen in 2002’s “Blue Car, Havana”?

“It’s all about abstract painting,” Stewart wrote within the text accompanying the photo.

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The retrospective sheds light on how Stewart’s work has modified over time, from his early black-and-white photographs to his newer prints that feature more color.

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

“I was still working in color, I just didn’t have the money to print them,” he added.

While photography can communicate information to people concerning the world around them, Stewart noted that there was a gulf between the actual 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.”