Three Washington venues celebrate the photography of Frank Stewart

“Nexus” includes more than 100 photos. It’s supplemented by a smaller display at the museum’s Southeast workshop and gallery at the Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus, known as Phillips@THEARC, which is showing five Stewart pictures and some of the photographer’s memorabilia. On display concurrently is a Stewart show at Gallery Neptune & Brown, a commercial venue.

Stewart was born in Nashville and grew up in Memphis, Chicago and New York. He’s been based in the last city for most of his life, serving as the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s senior staff photographer from 1990 to 2020. His travels with the troupe were preceded by solo trips to Cuba and West Africa in search of the origins of African American culture. He also has ties to New Orleans, where he evocatively documented the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and to D.C. The earliest pictures in this show were made by a 14-year-old Stewart at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; also on display are the photographer’s 1970s portraits of D.C. visual artists Alma Thomas and David Driskell.

As might be expected from Stewart’s gig with the Lincoln Center ensemble, he often photographs performances. His dramatic compositions employ such gambits as silhouettes, reflections, tight close-ups, deep black or bright red backdrops, and narrow depth of field. Concert scenes can appear frozen in time or remarkably kinetic, as in “Stomping the Blues,” in which Wynton Marsalis leads the orchestra offstage in a high-kicking line.

Stewart also choreographs offstage shots so they appear as theatrical as the concert ones. In the almost-monochromatic “Bone and Silhouette,” a performer appears as a black outline in a yellow-lit doorway framed in more black.

The galleries are arranged thematically and expand from Stewart’s best-known subject to showcase pictures of travel, from Ghana to China to Portugal, and social and environmental concerns. The pictures are sometimes presented as visual rhymes, as in two shots of bare, muscular backs. One portrays a man at Senegal’s Gorée island, a location associated with the trade in enslaved Africans, whose flexed body represents that infamy; the other is a street shot of a New York man who insisted on removing his shirt so he could display his healed bullet wound. Equally striking is the juxtaposition of a photo of three Black musicians parading through a New Orleans cemetery in a funeral procession and another in which a trio of men in Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods walk in the opposite direction in Mississippi.

Among the pictures that verge on abstraction is “Blue Car, Havana,” which immerses the viewer in a seascape that happens to be metal rather than water. To judge from this survey, however, the photographer’s favorite color is not blue. Bright reds abound, whether in concert shots or found on a Savannah tour bus or a spread of watermelon slices. Stewart is a master of black and white whose forays into color appear delectable.

More than a few of the photographs in “Nexus” were previously shown at Gallery Neptune & Brown in 2019-2020 and 2021 shows that were smaller but nearly as wide-ranging as the Phillips exhibition. The gallery’s current Stewart show, “Riffs and Responses,” is more tightly focused. The pictures are all of performers and often depict a precise instant of music making. Viewing the images is very nearly an aural experience.

“The Belter (Catherine Russell)” captures its subject with her head back and mouth wide open, apparently delivering a song’s climactic note. In “Roy Hargrove,” only the bell of the musician’s trumpet is in crisp focus; his hand is soft and his face barely visible. It’s as if the player has almost disappeared into the sound he’s making.

The pictures in “Riffs and Responses” employ Stewart’s usual techniques to spotlight and isolate musicians in fields of black or red. The effects are both electric and intimate, sharing a privileged viewpoint with spectators far removed in time and space from the second the artist memorializes. Stewart’s photos are historical, yet feel immediate. The long-gone moment is preserved forever in shape, light and shadow.

Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present

Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW, and Phillips@THEARC, 1801 Mississippi Ave. SE. 202-387-2151. phillipscollection.org.

Dates: At the Phillips Collection through Sept. 3; at Phillips@THEARC though Aug. 31.

Admission: Admission to the Phillips Collection is $16; $12 for seniors; $10 for students, teachers and military personnel; and free for members and ages 18 and under. Admission to Phillips@THEARC is free.

Frank Stewart: Riffs and Responses

Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. 202-986-1200. galleryneptunebrown.com.