John Stewart
British photographer who shot Picasso and Muhammad Ali
JOHN STEWART, who has died aged 97, began his career taking photographs of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, and later worked as a fashion and portrait photographer in New York, where he became best known for his images of Muhammad Ali, taken during a three-day shoot in 1977.
John Stewart Ullmann (he dropped the Ullmann in the Fifties) was born in London on December 4 1919, and spent his first years in Paris. Educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, Paris, he was subsequently sent to work, first in Manchester factories and then, aged 20, at the London stock exchange, a short-lived career which was interrupted by what Stewart later referred to as “a very difficult war”.
Having been assigned to the 15th Field Security Unit attached to the 18th Division, Stewart – who was fluent in French – was posted to do intelligence work in the Middle East. On the way, however, the ship was diverted to Singapore and he and his comrades were taken prisoner by the Japanese.
He spent the next three-and-a-half years in captivity, including some eight months in Sonkrai, one of the notorious “Burma railway” workcamps where 90 per cent of inmates died.
When the war ended he spent the next six years drifting, before settling in New York, where he married a young Russian girl, Natacha, with whom he would have two sons.
His photography career began in earnest in 1951 when, having bought himself a Leica camera, he took his wife to the south of France. There he was introduced to Picasso. “Picasso was normally very gruff with people coming to snoop,” he later recalled, “but he was charming to me, and let me snap away.”
The next day he received an invitation to photograph Matisse, who was “in bed working on sketches for his chapel at Vence”, and soon after he was introduced to Georges Braque, whom he also photographed. Back in New York after the Provence portraits, Stewart was offered a place on the weekly photography classes held in Richard Avedon’s studio by Alexei Brodovitch.
Brodovitch, the art director on Harper’s Bazaar and one of the tastemakers of mid-century photography, pointed Stewart towards work as an editorial photographer. He shot portraits for Fortune and fashion for Look magazine, before moving on to American Vogue under Diana Vreeland.
In 1977 Stewart was asked to photograph Muhammad Ali, and the three days he spent in his company produced some of the most memorable and affecting pictures of the boxer, including a portrait of Ali holding a butterfly and a close-up of his arm and fist. “Ali always arrived on time,” Steward recalled recently, “accompanied by friends, handlers and helpers. He was a real trouper and lent himself to all the demands, tricks and manipulations that a photographer pulls out of his bag. You had to be fast, however, because his attention span was very short – a matter of a minute, after which he got bored and restless.”
Stewart’s books included To the River Kwai: Two Journeys, 1943, 1979.
His wife and a son predeceased him. He is survived by his companion, Luciana Eng, and a son.