By Lauren FitzPatrick
Staff writer
Bill Stewart wanted his photographs to beautify ordinary South Side folks and capture their fleeting splendor for eternity.
With his art photography studio in the splendid Rhumboogie Building on Garfield Boulevard in the 1940s and 1950s — on Chicago’s so-called “black belt” — Mr. Stewart immortalized South Side history one person at a time.
“The people were trying to live the part of real Americans, and he captured that in the photos,” said his grandson and namesake, William Lanier Lee, a Daily Southtown staff writer. “That was his joy. He loved taking ordinary people and making them the best they ever looked.”
Mr. Stewart died Nov. 5 at age 91 in his apartment in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.
Mr. Stewart also counted among his subjects boxing champion Joe Louis and wife Marva Louis, Ebony/Jet publisher John H. Johnson and crooners Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughan — catching them as they passed through Chicago and specifically through Louis’ club in the Rhumboogie Building.
Though he often bumped elbows with the black famous and elite, Mr. Stewart preferred a more subtle life, focused on his studio.
He outlived many of his better-known subjects, retiring in 2001, said his only daughter, Lanar Stewart Lee. But he still photographed his family as he always had, she said.
“If my mother gave me a bath, that was a picture,” she said. “If we were standing up looking crazy, that was a picture. The only ones he didn’t get was when we were asleep.”
Born into a church family on April 22, 1915, in Memphis, Tenn., Mr. Stewart sang baritone with the choir at the church where his grandfather preached. The third of four children (two girls and two boys), he grew up fostering a love of music and art.
Mr. Stewart tried to enroll at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., but couldn’t come up with enough tuition, his grandson said.
He soon moved to Chicago to study art and work on federal Works Progress Administration art projects with Margaret Burroughs, who later founded the DuSable Museum of African American History, Lee said.
He was drafted briefly into the Army during World War II but was released because of a heart murmur. That heart condition cost him a career as a bantamweight boxer, but not before he won a Golden Gloves title, his grandson said.
By 1943, Mr. Stewart opened his studio, and a young woman from Shreveport, La., applied to help him out with smaller photos. The two fell in love, and the pair married in 1946 and had a daughter that Mr. Stewart insisted on naming Lanar Wilhemina after himself. When the couple separated about 1960, he brought up his daughter on his own.
During the marriage, the Stewarts ran with Chicago’s black society. Mr. Stewart fashioned marvelous millinery creations for his wife to wear — on one, he perched atop her head a tiny smocked photographer behind a battery-powered camera lens that really flashed, his daughter recalled.
“When they were going out to party, he would do (my mother’s) makeup,” Stewart Lee said. “I was always intrigued by that. He used to mix makeup and sell powder.”
At one point, Mr. Stewart sold photos to the Chicago Defender, and he also captured historical shots for his personal collection. He rushed to the wake for Emmett Till — who was killed in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman — to shoot photos of the crowds that gathered to pay homage to the Chicago teen.
After taking a portrait of John H. Johnson, Mr. Stewart was offered a job at Johnson’s publishing house. He turned it down, not wanting to leave his business.
“His dream was to have an arts studio, a photography studio,” Lee said. “It would have been a different type of path for him because he was raising my mother alone at that point.”
A snappy dresser who wouldn’t go into the Loop in just anything, Mr. Stewart believed that “clothes don’t make the man; they make the gentleman.”
He taught himself business management and how to apply makeup on his subjects, Stewart Lee said, and he took dancing lessons — “always trying to broaden his horizons.”
But his “Stewart Art Studio” — which over the years was at three locations along Garfield Boulevard — continued to photograph the people who returned to him, his grandson said.
“He made them look ways they never thought they would look before,” Lee said. “It’s why he stayed in business instead of seeking a more famous path.”
Aside from his daughter and grandson, Mr. Stewart is survived by a granddaughter, Felice Lee Avery; two great-grandsons, Jason and Brandon Avery; and many nieces, nephews, colleagues and friends.
He was a member of the National Photographers Association.
Arrangements are by Griffin Funeral Home, (312) 842-2422. Visitation will be held at noon Monday at the funeral home, 3232 King Drive, followed by a memorial service at 1 p.m.
Lauren FitzPatrick may be reached at lfitzpatrick@dailysouthtown.com or (708) 633-5964.
