By Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
Photographer Frank Stewart is not a household name, but the aptly titled retrospective Time Capsule makes a strong case that he should be. Stewart, who cut his teeth as an assistant to artist Romare Bearden, has proven his mettle in all types of settings—smoky café booths occupied by furtive lovers, streets populated with whitewall tires and overstuffed clotheslines, dimly lit jazz sessions, and dusty African roads. Stewart printed his image of Louisville, Kentucky,’s skyline on aluminum, making the lace curtain through which he photographed the view unexpectedly leaden. Two locales in particular seem to have jolted Stewart’s creative juices. In Cuba, he flipped the conventions of vintage-car photography by focusing solely on a single car hood’s mesmerizing, overlapping layers of blue. And in post-Katrina New Orleans, Stewart captured a car half submerged in oily water, its negative space forming a cross.