Chuck Stewart

Charles Frederick Stewart was born on the seventeenth of December 1927 at Henrietta, Texas, the son of Roby Stewart — a Texas Pacific Railway porter — and Rosabelle Stewart. He was raised in the segregated Black community of post-First-World-War north Texas and at the family relocation to Tucson, Arizona in 1936.

He enrolled at Ohio University at Athens, Ohio in 1945 in the photography programme — and completed the bachelor's degree in photography in 1949. He was the first Black graduate of the Ohio University photography programme.

He served in the United States Army across 1950 and 1951 in the Signal Corps photographic unit at the Korean War period — and was photographer of the Far East Command headquarters at Tokyo in 1951.

He was hired in 1952 at the New York studio of the jazz photographer Herman Leonard as principal assistant — and acquired the Leonard studio on Leonard's relocation to Europe in 1956. He operated the principal Chuck Stewart Studio at New York from 1956 to his retirement.

He photographed across the next six decades the principal personalities of the American jazz tradition — including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker.

He was the principal album-cover photographer of the Impulse! Records label across the 1960s — including the principal cover of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme of 1964. He produced approximately two thousand album covers across his career — the principal photographic record of the modern American jazz tradition.

He was the principal documentary photographer of the John Coltrane Quartet recording sessions of the early to mid 1960s — including the principal recording-session photographs of A Love Supreme, the Africa/Brass session of 1961, and the Newport Jazz Festival of 1965.

His principal photographic collection — approximately fifty thousand surviving negatives — was donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution in 2010.

He died at Teaneck, New Jersey on the twentieth of January 2017 of natural causes, at eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the principal portraitist of the American jazz tradition.