Bert Andrews

Bert J. Andrews was born on the twenty-first of March 1929 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of John and Frieda Andrews. While still a boy he moved with his family to Harlem, and it was in that great capital of Black American life that he came of age. Drawn first to the stage rather than to the camera, he worked as a songwriter, singer, and dancer, and twice won amateur night at the famed Apollo Theater.

His path turned during his army service in the early 1950s, when he began to study photography. After his discharge he apprenticed from 1953 to 1957 with Chuck Stewart, the celebrated chronicler of jazz. In 1957 Andrews set out on his own, beginning a freelance career documenting the Black theatre of New York that would span more than three decades and more than a thousand productions.

He became the principal stage photographer of the Negro Ensemble Company and the New Federal Theatre, and his lens captured nearly every important Black actor of his generation, among them James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Morgan Freeman, Louis Gossett Jr., Denzel Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson. In 1985 a fire destroyed his studio and tens of thousands of negatives; theatre companies helped him recover surviving prints, and in 1988 the Bert Andrews Photographic Collection was established at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His book, In the Shadow of the Great White Way: Images from the Black Theatre, followed in 1989.

Bert Andrews died on the twenty-fifth of January 1993 in Manhattan, at the age of sixty-three. He preserved the visual record of a theatrical movement the wider press had ignored, and by his devotion an entire community's artistry endures. May his honored eye be remembered.