Chuck Stewart, who could not master the piano but succeeded indelibly with a camera, becoming a fixture in the jazz world with his photographs of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah Washington and many others, died on Jan. 20 in Teaneck, N.J. He was 89.
Mr. Stewart often framed his subjects in black, as if to prevent the eye from being distracted by anything but the singer or musician.
“There was a certain warmth and intimacy to his work,” the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern said in an interview. “Photographers weren’t always welcome in recording studios, but he was.
“Producers and engineers accepted him,” Mr. Morgenstern continued. “He was not the least bit intrusive. He would never snap a shutter in the middle of a take. He was the extreme opposite of the paparazzi.”
Mr. Stewart created an archive of some 800,000 negatives, and by his count his photographs appeared on the covers of at least 2,000 albums.
From Stewart’s obituary in the New York Times by Richard Sandomir; Photo by Chester Higgins, Jr.
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