John Stewart
"ADVENTURES OF A FOOTLOOSE PHOTOGRAPHER"

Exhibition: 7 September – 15 October, 2016
Opening: Wednesday, 7 September, 19:30-21h

Born in London in 1919 and brought up in Paris, John Stewart came to photography in the early 1950s, after a chance meeting with Picasso in the French village of Vallauris. Stewart’s request to photograph the artist sitting in a field of tall grass was granted and a few days later, he received an invitation to photograph Matisse in Nice. This was the beginning of a stellar career that saw Stewart go to work in New York under the celebrated director of Harper’s Bazaar, Alexei Brodovitch. His work then began to appear regularly in Vogue, House & Garden and Elle and is now in museums and collections around the world.

The exhibition at Galerie Clairefontaine will be a retrospective of his works including a selection of his famous series of Muhammad Ali. The show will feature exceptional prints of flowers, portraits, still-lifes, draperies and entropies. As John Stewart describes it himself: "Come to the seventies, little by little I let go of art directors and copy writers, and soon rediscovered my early fascination for still-life. I often used a 19th century method of making photographic prints, known as Charcoal printing. Using pigments rather than silver salts, the technique allows for deep, powerful blacks and a kind of sensuality unknown in conventional printing."