Photographer Witness to an Era: Chuck Stewart

Through a combination of talent, luck and access Chuck Stewart, now 87, photographed a huge number of Jazz’s most important figures from the 1940s to the 1970s. But, as he tells Newsweek’s Jared T. Miller, he created some of his now classic portraits of the likes of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, singer Nina Simone, multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, bandleader Duke Ellington and pianist Thelonious Monk only because he was a professional photographer doing a job for many record companies. Yet overly modest Stewart, who shot his first picture at 13, and studied photography in university, also says he would listen to the artists’ music before he took their pictures and decide how best they should be presented. His biggest regret: while most photos of Coltrane during his tenure at Impulse! are by Stewart, the cover shot of Trane’s famous A Love Supreme LP is from its producer’s snapshot.