CHADDS FORD, Pennsylvania — At first glance, it resembles an aerial photograph of a war-ravaged cemetery, with charred coffins torn from broken concrete vaults and vaulted marble headstones destroyed by a bomb blast.
Then the viewer begins to make out details: the chests and vaults are actually parts of a keyboard. Instead of names and dates, the apparent gravestones are engraved with words like “vibrato” and “third harmonic.”
“It looks like a graveyard,” said photographer Frank Stewart.
Stewart’s haunting photograph of a New Orleans church organ destroyed by Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters is part of a retrospective of his decades 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 at the Brandywine Museum of Art through September 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 how it affected the culture,” Stewart said of his work in New Orleans after Katrina. “This organ, the music, everything matches. It all comes together. I just wanted to show the destruction of the churches, the music, the culture.”
Music is fundamental to Stewart’s practice. He was the longtime photographer for the Savannah Music Festival and for 30 years 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 a brother to me,” 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.”
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, Stewart has his own ties to jazz and blues. His stepfather, Phineas Newborn Jr., was a pianist who worked with musicians such as Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, and B.B. King.
Stewart describes himself as a child of the “apartheid south” and has drawn inspiration from photographers such as Ernest Cole and Roy DeCarava, who was among Stewart’s teachers at Cooper Union in New York, where Stewart earned a bachelor of fine arts degree. DeCarava’s photographs of Harlem in the 1950s led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes about the 1955 book, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life.”
Cole, a South African photographer, rose to fame in 1967 with “House of Bondage,” the first book that inspired Stewart. The book chronicled apartheid using photographs he smuggled out of the country. Cole never matched his early success and fell on hard times before dying in New York City at age 49. 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 saw him on the street and we talked,” says 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,” explains 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, then the nation’s largest black daily, and shooting thongs for magazines including Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise. He looks back less fondly on a brief period of large-format work photographing art for brochures and catalogs, an endeavor he describes as “tedious.”
Yet Stewart has always maintained an artistic approach to his work, attempting to combine patterns, colors, tones and space in a visually appealing way, without the viewer having to search 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. How else can you explain the color and texture in 2002’s “Blue Car, Havana”?
“It’s all about abstract painting,” Stewart said in the text on the wall next to the photo.
The retrospective highlights how Stewart’s work has evolved over time, from his early black-and-white photographs to his more recent prints, which feature more color.
“They’re two different languages,” he said. “English would be black and white. French would be the color.”
“I’ve been working in color all the time, but I just didn’t have the money to print them,” he added.
While photography can provide people with information about the world around them, Stewart notes that there is a gap 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.”