American photographer most noted for documenting Indianapolis, Indiana’s jazz music scene along Indiana Avenue, a hub of activity for the city’s African-American community in the 1940s and 1950s. Brown opened his own photography studio, the Brown Show Case, on Indiana Avenue in the late 1940s. During a brief residence in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the mid-1950s, Brown opened a photography studio and became an editor at Sepia magazine. Brown returned to Indianapolis in 1956 and established a new studio on the city’s eastside, where he concentrated on portraits and did freelance photography, including work for the Indianapolis Recorder. During his twenty-year career, cut short due to a heart ailment, Brown photographed Dizzy Gillespie, jazz trombonist Jimmy Cleveland, the Hampton Sisters, the Milt Buckner Trio, and The Mills Brothers, among others. He also photographed local churches, businesses, and street scenes, as well as notable individuals in Indianapolis’s African-American community and nationally known boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.
Brown, who grew up in Indianapolis and attended Crispus Attucks High School, also studied at Tennessee A and I (now known as Tennessee State University) in Nashville, Tennessee, and a photography school in Chicago, Illinois, before returning to his hometown to begin his career as a photographer. Brown was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, a thirty-second degree Prince Hall Mason, and also served as an assistant pastor at Indianapolis’s Martindale Avenue Church of Christ. Many of his photographs from the 1940s and 1950s are included the collection of the Indiana Historical Society.
Brown suffered from a rheumatic heart condition and died on 9 September 1959 in Indianapolis, a year after undergoing open heart surgery.
Link to Wikipedia biography