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| Photographers (from left) Frank Stewart, Ming Smith Murray, (William) Onikwa Bill Wallace and Jim Alexander discuss their art at a special program held in conjunction with the “Original Acts” exhibition. |
Four noted photographers, whose work is featured in “Original Acts,” an exhibition of photographs of African-American performers from the Paul R. Jones Collection, discussed their art and shared stories from their careers with students and faculty on Friday, March 22.
Jim Alexander, Ming Smith Murray, Frank Stewart and (William) Onikwa Bill Wallace have brought their own distinctive artistry to photography to capture internationally known dancers, singers and musicians on film.
President David P. Roselle welcomed the audience and announced that Mechanical Hall will be renovated as a permanent home for the Paul R. Jones Collection, one of the nation’s largest and most complete collections of work by African American artists, which was donated to the University of Delaware in February 2001.
Introduced by Jones, the photographers spoke to the audience and then adjourned to the University Gallery, where they discussed their photographs, on display through March 28.
Stewart, a Lincoln Center staff photographer, was first to speak and talked about his photographs as they were shown on a screen. For unusual compositions, he took pictures from behind his subjects, such as a line of musicians taking a bow in London, a group of women wearing their white circular Easter hats and the torso of a muscular man with a cross hanging between his shoulder blades, entitled “Only God Can Watch My Back.”
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| Frank Stewart discusses one of his photographs. |
His advice to beginning photographers was to “put yourself in your pictures and take them for yourself and for strangers.”
Wallace, a photographer for many years for the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, has photographed African Americans in all walks of life, from a women being arrested for shoplifting to well-known musicians and, more recently, participants in Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans.
He also visited Liberia in the early 1990s to make a documentary.
Wallace is known for the intensity and energy of his close-up photographs of musicians.
Alexander began his career when he won a Brownie Hawkeye in a dice game while in the Navy. An enterprising photographer, he took pictures of the men on the base for 50 cents.
When he acquired a jumper with stripes for the sailors to pose in, he upped the price to $1 apiece.
He learned more about his profession while working with a photographer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes on the base.
Alexander has photographed leading jazz musicians for the past 30 years, among them Duke Ellington, whom he honored in his book “Duke and Other Legends.”
With the group, Alexander shared his experience when he took an unauthorized photograph of Sammy Davis, Jr., recalling how he crept down the aisle on his hands and knees and waited for the exact right moment to get his shot.
Called an artist who “paints with a camera,” Murray, a graduate of Howard University, has sold photographs to the Museum of Modern Art. She said she was headed for a career in medicine until she became “hooked” on photography as an art form.
She and Stewart were members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York-based group of African-American photographers who have given exhibitions and presentations on their work.
Many of Murray’s photographs in the exhibition are of dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham in her later years.
The people she photographed, she said, “were people in my life.”
The photographers discussed how they took their photographs and how they achieved some of their effects.
Their advice was that while modern technology, such as in fast film, makes more things possible and lessens limitations, it is secondary in learning to become a successful professional photographer and artist.
Article by Sue Moncure
Photographs by Kathy Flickinger
March 27, 2002
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