Chuck Stewart

Charles Hugh Stewart was born on the twenty-first of May 1927 in Henrietta, Texas, the son of Hugh Paris Stewart, a chef, and Anne Harris, a domestic worker. The family made its way west, and it was in Tucson, Arizona, that young Charles came of age. For his thirteenth birthday he received a Kodak Brownie camera, and on that very day he photographed the contralto Marian Anderson when she visited his school, selling prints for two dollars apiece — a professional from his first exposure.

He carried that gift to Ohio University, then the only degree-granting collegiate photography program in the nation that would admit Black students. There he formed a lifelong friendship with fellow student and photographer Herman Leonard. After graduating in 1949, Stewart was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving as a military photographer and documenting atomic-bomb tests in the Nevada desert.

Returning to New York in the early 1950s, he worked alongside Leonard and eventually took over his studio, becoming the pre-eminent portraitist of American jazz. His lens found Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, and, most famously, John Coltrane during the 1964 sessions for "A Love Supreme." Across seven decades he produced an archive of hundreds of thousands of images, with more than two thousand gracing album covers for Impulse!, Verve, Mercury, and Reprise.

Chuck Stewart died on the twentieth of January 2017 in Teaneck, New Jersey, at the age of eighty-nine. He gave the music a face, and the honor endures in every frame he made.