Bert Andrews

Bert Andrews was born on the twenty-first of December 1929 at Chicago, Illinois, the son of a Chicago Black family of the principal South Side community of the post-Great-Migration period. He was raised on the Chicago South Side and at the family relocation to Detroit in the late 1930s.

He served in the United States Army from 1948 to 1952 in the Signal Corps photographic unit at the post-Korean-War period — and was hired in 1952 by the Detroit Free Press as a junior photographic technician.

He relocated to New York in 1958 and was hired at the New York studio of the white commercial photographer Tracey Mathewson as principal assistant — and opened the principal Bert Andrews Studio at New York in 1962.

He was named principal documentary photographer of the principal Negro Ensemble Company at New York in 1967 — at the principal founding period of the Negro Ensemble Company at the Off-Broadway St. Marks Playhouse — and held the principal Negro Ensemble Company documentary photographer position from 1967 to his death in 1993.

He produced across the twenty-six years at the Negro Ensemble Company the principal documentary photographic record of the principal late-twentieth-century New York Black theatre tradition — including the principal photographs of the principal Negro Ensemble Company productions of Lonne Elder's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men of 1969, Joseph A. Walker's The River Niger of 1972, Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play of 1981, and Samm-Art Williams's Home of 1979.

He was named principal documentary photographer of the principal New Federal Theatre at New York in 1970 under the principal Black director Woodie King Jr. — and held the principal New Federal Theatre documentary photographer position from 1970 to his death.

He produced the principal documentary photographic record of the principal late-twentieth-century New York Black avant-garde theatre — including the principal photographs of the principal Adrienne Kennedy, Ed Bullins, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, and Ntozake Shange productions of the period.

His principal archive — approximately seventy thousand surviving negatives — was donated to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library in 1995.

He died at New York on the twenty-third of August 1993 of complications of AIDS, at sixty-three.

He is honored here as the principal documentary photographer of the New York Black theatre.