gallery neptune and brown is delighted to present our second exhibition with Frank Stewart. During the past two years, when it wasn’t possible to travel and take photographs, Stewart combed through his archives. The resulting exhibition is a varied collection of photographs spanning the last thirty years. Many of the photos have never before been on view. Stewart’s work centers around communities in Africa and its diaspora in the United States and in Cuba, starting in the 1970s. In the same period, he began photographing jazz clubs and their musicians.

In Diary of a Globetrotter, the photographs were taken across the US; Savannah, Georgia, Chicago, Illinois, New York, Oregon, Washington D.C.; as well as in England, Ghana, Mali, and New Zealand. The works selected for this exhibition illustrate the command Stewart has of the medium as well as his ability to capture intimate moments of daily life. His compositions are emotionally charged with joy, curiosity, and tenderness. Stewart is an intense observer. He is constantly exploring familiar moments in addition to discovering new subjects in communities worldwide.

His framing is dictated by what his camera allows. If it doesn’t work in the frame, he works it out, rather than manipulating the photo with post-processing. This exhibition includes both black and white and color photography, a development Stewart only fully embraced in 2013. The exhibition explores two dialogues. Stewart says, “The black and white photos explore the relationship between form and content. The color photos are a conversation in texture, pigment, and composition.”

Stewart grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and Chicago, Illinois. He studied at Middle Tennessee State and later at the Art Institute of Chicago as a student of Garry Winogrand. He received his BFA in photography from Cooper Union where he studied under Roy DeCarava. While filming the documentary Two Centuries of Black American Art in 1975, he met the artist Romare Beardon. Stewart worked with Beardon until his passing in 1988. From 1992 until 2019 he was the lead photographer for Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Pictured above: Only God to Watch My Back, NY, 1988 (Left) and Stonehenge, 2011 (Right)