Between 1968 and 1969, he spent a semester at the formally predominantly all-white Middle Tennessee State College, which was an hour from Fisk University, a historically Black college. Traveling up to Fisk University to visit his cousin, he found himself spending time at the Black university. At Fisk, he met David Driskell and Bobby Sengstacke. About the same time in 1969, Stewart met the photographer Roy DeCarava, who would become a mentor and who supported Stewart’s admission into Cooper Union, from which he graduated in 1975.

With his BFA in photography, Stewart went on to be a concert and on-set photographer, assisting and driving the bands he photographed. In 1975, he became a staff photographer at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the first photographer artist in residence, and taught photography courses at the Museum. In 1982, he was invited to join the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black artists committed to photographing Black life. Two years later, in 1984, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Young Master Fellowship in photography and photographed the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

Since 1992, Stewart has served as the lead photographer for Jazz at the Lincoln Center. He has been the focus of many solo exhibitions and has been included in numerous group exhibitions. In 2023, Stewart’s career retrospective, Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s To the Present, was mounted in Washington, DC at the Phillips Collection.

The Studio Museum in Harlem has exhibited Stewart’s work in numerous group exhibitions, including The Blue Aesthetic (1990); Circa 1970 (2016); and Their Own Harlem (2017). Stewart’s work has been in the Studio Museum’s permanent collection since 1979.