Frank Stefanko
Encyclopedia
Frank Stefanko is a fine art photographer with connections to New Jersey performers Patti Smith
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....

 and Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen , nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter who records and tours with the E Street Band...

. Stefanko's recently released photographs, taken in the 1960s through the 80s, shed new light on the early careers of the two musicians.

Stefanko was born in Philadelphia in 1946, and has been absorbed by photography since he was given an old box-camera when about seven years of age. Among his early "teachers" and inspirations were stark, black-and-white film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...

 movies, cinematographers such as James Wong Howe
James Wong Howe
James Wong Howe, A.S.C. was a Chinese American cinematographer who worked on over 130 films...

, Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...

, and reality photographers such as Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal." A friend said that Arbus said that she was "afraid.....

, who shot every-day people in natural settings. Stefanko received fine-art training at Glassboro College (now Rowan University
Rowan University
Rowan University is a public university in Glassboro, New Jersey, USA with a satellite campus in Camden, New Jersey. The school was founded in 1923 as Glassboro Normal School on a twenty-five acre tract of land donated by the town...

) in Glassboro, New Jersey
Glassboro, New Jersey
Glassboro is a borough in Gloucester County, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2000 Census, the borough population was 19,068....

.

It was at Glassboro College, in the mid-sixties, that Stefanko met and became friends with Patti Smith. He began photographing her even before Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men...

 did. This friendship with Smith led to an introduction to Bruce Springsteen.

Stefanko's photographs grace the album covers of Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Darkness on the Edge of Town is the fourth album by Bruce Springsteen, released in the late spring of 1978. The album marked the end of a three year period of forced hiatus from recording brought on by contractual obligations and legal battling with former manager Mike Appel...

http://www.kshe95.com/musicnews/story.aspx?ID=1287219 and The River, and also the cover of Southside Johnny
Southside Johnny
Southside Johnny is an American singer-songwriter, who usually fronts his band Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes.-Early days:...

's Hearts of Stone
Hearts of Stone (Asbury Jukes)
Hearts of Stone is the third album by New Jersey rock–R&B band Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, released in 1978.-History:Hearts of Stone has been called "the best album Bruce Springsteen never recorded", which is not quite accurate...

album. His photos appear in Springsteen's Live 1975–1985 CD, in Tracks, Greatest Hits, in the book Greetings from E Street by Robert Santelli, American Madness by Julio Blanco, as well as in books by Dave Marsh
Dave Marsh
Dave Marsh is an American music critic, author, editor and radio talk show host. He was a formative editor of Creem magazine, has written for various publications such as Newsday, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone, and has published numerous books about music and musicians, mostly focused on...

.

Many of Stefanko's photos, including some never before seen, appear in the special edition, remastered thirtieth anniversary box-set of Darkness and in the documentary, The Promise, released in November, 2010. Stefanko appears in a brief interview in The Promise. http://www.hbo.com/#/about/the-promise.html

Stefanko's images have been shown in the exhibition "Springsteen: Troubadour of the Highway", which toured the US from 2002–2004, sponsored by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. Colleen Sheehy, curator of the production is quoted as saying, "Frank Stefanko's photographs show a sublime convergence of singer and image at a critical point in Springsteen's career". The "Troubadour" show appeared at the Cranbrook Art Museum, The Experience Music Project, the Newark Museum of Art, and at Monmouth University.

Stefanko is among the 43 fine-art photographers invited to donate a print to "FOCUS: an auction of the finest photography to benefit City Harvest...." The fund-raiser on September 18, 2008 supported City Harvest, a food collection bank in New York City. http://www.cityharvest.org/images/pdf/Focus_Evite.pdf

One-man photographic exhibitions with vintage silver-gel portraits by Stefanko include "Days of Hopes and Dreams: An Intimate Portrait of Bruce Springsteen" (Chris Murray, Director of the Govinda Gallery in Georgetown, DC, said, "The Haddonfield, New Jersey pictures ...are among the best photographs of Springsteen.",) and "The Swamps of Jersey" tour, an installation shown at SNAP Galleries in Birmingham, England and in the Morrison Hotel Galleries in SoHo, New York and LaJolla, California.

Patti Smith-American Artist has been produced as a fine-art photography book containing some of the “most beautiful portraits of Patti Smith ever taken” according to photographer, Bob Gruen
Bob Gruen
Bob Gruen is an American photographer known for his rock 'n' roll photographs.Gruen was born in New York City. He began photographing rock stars with Bob Dylan and served as John Lennon's personal photographer during his time in New York City. Gruen is best known for his photograph of Lennon...

. The intimate photographs, along with Stefanko's first-hand accounts, capture the period of cultural change from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s, when a new genre of music was being born. The book chronicles young Smith’s emergence as a writer, painter, singer-songwriter, performer, poet, mystic, and political activist: a true “American Artist”. Smith has said of Stefanko, "good [turnpike] exit, good work, good friend."

Days of Hope and Dreams is Stefanko's first book, published in 2003. It is "An intimate Portrait of Bruce Springsteen" in black and white images taken from 1978–1982. The book contains recollections and anecdotes of the friendship between the two men. In the book's introduction, Springsteen says: "The cover shot of 'Darkness' was taken in Frank's bedroom, and any exterior shots were taken either in Frank's yard or on the streets of Haddonfield [NJ]. The pictures were raw. Frank had a way of stripping away any celebrity refuse you may have picked up along the way, and finding the you in you....Frank always shot your internal life. He let your external imperfections show. His photos had a purity and poetry...."

Stefanko was a resident of Haddonfield, New Jersey
Haddonfield, New Jersey
Haddonfield is a borough located in Camden County, New Jersey. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough had a total population of 11,593....

for many years.

Books by Stefanko

  • Days of Hope and Dreams: An Intimate Portrait of Bruce Springsteen. Watson-Guptill, c.2003. Insight, 2003. Watson-Guptill, 2003. ISBN 0-8230-8387-X.

Second Edition release September, 2011, by Insight Editions. ISBN-10: 1608870316
  • Patti Smith American Artist. Insight, c.2006. ISBN 1-933784-06-7.

External links



Photographers Against Hunger http://backstreets.com/hunger/index.html*
Monmouth University symposium with Stefanko & Colleen Sheehy

South Jersey Magazine Interview (search Stefanko) http://www.southjersey.com/articles/?articleID+19914
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