‘Frank Stewart’s WSJ Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present’ Review: Visual Music

Please see below for an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Review of Frank Stewart’s Nexus at The Phillips Collection

‘Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present’ Review: Visual Music

An exhibition at the Phillips Collection tracks Stewart’s movement through geographic, social, cultural and artistic realms, highlighting his passion for Africa and jazz.

By William Meyers July 4, 2023 7:00 am ET

‘Boo and Humphrey’ (1989) PHOTO: THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION

“Frank Stewart gets around: “Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present,” the exhibition of his pictures at the Phillips Collection, has him moving through various geographical, social, cultural and artistic realms. Mr. Stewart was born in 1949 in Nashville, Tenn., to black parents who had musical careers. They divorced when he was about a year old, but he had continuing contact with both and so, from an early age, had personal relationships with many of the great jazz figures of the era. His mother’s second husband was famed pianist Phineas Newborn Jr.; his father lived next to Miles Davis’s sister and Mr. Stewart met the great trumpet player there. He studied photography at several institutions and got a BFA from Cooper Union in 1975; his teachers included Roy DeCarava, Charles Harbutt, Joel Meyerowitz, Arnold Newman, and Garry Winogrand, a brilliant array. The impress of their teaching is evident in the 103 prints cocurated by Fred Moten, a poet and theorist at NYU, and Ruth Fine, a retired curator from the National Gallery of Art.

The earliest pictures are “Nine Snapshots From March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” (1963), fading 3¼-by-3¼-inch color prints taken with his mother’s Kodak Brownie and processed at a drugstore. The pictures from the march are pretty good for a teenager with a plastic camera, but by the time Mr. Stewart went to West Africa in a Cooper Union program, he had learned a lot about both African culture and photography and had a professional camera. (A vitrine displays six of Mr. Stewart’s cameras, including a battered Leica M2.) In “Call and Response, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire” (1974) the woman in the foreground bends her body as she responds to the drummers beating rhythm behind her; a crowd of onlookers is included, as in some of Garry Winogrand’s classic street photography. Mr. Stewart made most of the prints in the exhibition himself and this one, like nearly all the black-and-white images here, has a black border. The black border is an indication that the entire frame was included in the print, that nothing was cropped; it means the decisions about what to include and what to exclude were made as the photographer framed the shot. This is a demanding way to work. “

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