Longtime local photographer and musician Charles Steck, who died on June 14 at 66 due to complications following back surgery, was deeply admired as a bassist in multiple area bands. A gifted photographer who documented the city’s avant garde music and arts culture, he was a frequent contributor to City Paper; his work also appeared in publications including the Washington Post and Architectural Digest. In both the local music and photography communities, Steck was loved as someone who was low-key, steady, and deeply talented.
During the late 1980s, Steck became an unofficial photographer for the downtown club d.c. space, where his wife, Dot Steck, served as a cook and popular bartender. Dot used her calligraphy skills to create flyers listing d.c. space’s jam-packed performance schedule filled with an array of local, edgy musicians, poets, filmmakers, and dancers. Steck photographed many of those artists as they performed on stage and in his studio above the club.
A distinctive aspect of Steck’s photography was his gift for using dark tones in black and white images. “He wasn’t afraid of darkness, and his images are rich with it,” says Brian Tate, who collaborated with Steck on various projects during the 1980s, including three citywide film festivals and a band that changed its name with every gig. “The work pulled you in, and Charles made it seem natural…There was a very specific artistry and vision to his photography that if you saw one of those images, you knew it was his. Charles had a way of capturing the soulfulness of the music he played and the people he shot.”
Tate describes Steck as a “sought-after bassist who was also a phenomenal photographer.” He says there was an inextricable link between Steck’s visual and musical endeavors. “Some of the best photographers and bass players have an ability to not call attention to themselves while they’re doing incredible work,” he says.
Steck was best known in local music circles for playing bass in many area punk and rock bands, including the Velvet Monkeys in the early ’80s and High Back Chairs in the late ’80s to early ’90s. Over the years, he continued to perform and record, with idiosyncratic rock singer-songwriter Lida Husik in the mid-to-late ’90s, and with Rambling Shadows on and off from the late 1990s through 2019.
He was born in Queens, New York, and, because his father served in the U.S. Army, the family moved frequently. As a child, Steck lived in France, Arizona, and Brooklyn before his family settled in Potomac. During his senior year at Winston Churchill High School, he met Dorothy “Dot” Thomas, then a junior. Dot’s older brother played in a cover band with Steck. After graduating high school in 1974, Steck went on to study photography at Montgomery College and the Maine Photographic Workshop. Shortly after he and Dot married in 1982, they moved to Dupont Circle.
Dot started working at d.c. space in 1988, and it was there that the artistic couple found their community of fellow creatives. “Charles was a central figure …. in the D.C. artist community for decades,” says performer and poet Silvana Straw. “If it wasn’t for Charles, we wouldn’t have a treasure trove of images from the ’80s underground scene and the highly creative, wild, and sacred times we lived together…..What a gift he was to us, and what a gift he has left us.”
Former d.c. space owner Bill Warrell recalls that, in 1989, Steck was one of the first artists who approached him about renting studio space on the building’s third floor. The Stecks paid $35 per month for the tiny room with a low ceiling, where Charles set up a salon for shooting portraits and Dot painted cityscapes. “Charles would invite people downstairs to come up for a portrait,” recalls Warrell. “He was documenting a scene that turned out to be pretty wonderful.”
Warrell tapped Steck to shoot many of the events he produced for District Curators, the nonprofit production company that brought an array of avant-garde artists to the District between 1978 and 2003. He is particularly fond of Steck’s portrait of jazz artist Sun Ra, shot at the Atlantic Building, home of the original 9:30 Club. “That portrait was absolutely amazing,” Warrell says. “You were looking right into his eyes, into his soul. It was like there was a galaxy floating around Sun Ra’s head. It’s one of the best portraits of Sun Ra I’ve seen—and one of the best photographs I’ve ever seen.”
Moonlighting as a waiter at d.c. space, dancer and performance artist Ajax Joe Drayton participated in several photo sessions with Steck. “He was shooting photographs for a lot of artists working at that time: Essex Hemphill and Wayson Jones, Larry Duckette, Michelle Parkerson. The punk rock scene, the Black gay poets, R&B singers, Sun Ra, Lester Bowie,” says Drayton.
“Charles, in my opinion, was at least a half-giant walking among the wizards of Washington D.C., sort of like Hagrid, but with more power,” Drayton adds. “In the middle of wild performance people, he was always this unassuming person, quietly contributing his art.”
Steck shot album covers for numerous area bands, including Shudder to Think and Crippled Pilgrims. Some of his images appear in Sam Knee’s new book, A Scene In Between USA, which features photographs from the indie and underground scene spanning 1982 to ’88. Steck’s photo of sound engineer Don Zientara graces the cover of the recently released book, The Inner Ear of Don Zientara: A Half Century of Recording in One of America’s Most Innovative Studios, Through the Voices of Musicians. Online, some of his photographic work can be found living on an archival site that captures images from d.c. space’s heyday.
Poet and music archivist Reuben Jackson, who frequently appeared at d.c. space’s open mic poetry events, was one of Steck’s early subjects. “As an archivist and history nerd I’m grateful that he documented a vibrant and crucial time in this city’s history,” Jackson says. “You look at those old flyers, and you think, ‘Damn. All those people played here when downtown closed at 6 p.m.’ We have it on record, and I think that is important.”
Jackson still remembers the first time he encountered the Stecks sometime in the mid-1980s. “Charles was playing guitar and Dot was playing the flute, and they were playing an old song by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, ‘Whispering.’ Even now, you probably couldn’t find 10 people who knew Paul Whiteman, let alone that song,” he says. “I heard their arrangement of this song, and I thought, ‘this is unusual.’ Punk was the thing, so this was radical in its own way.”
In 1982, Steck joined psychedelic garage punk band the Velvet Monkeys as a bassist; he remained with the group for around two years. “As a bass player, Charles didn’t just follow what we played on guitar,” says band leader Don Fleming. “He would make up parts that were his own arrangements that worked within the song. He was a very musical person who thought on the levels that only the great players do. He was one of those great bass players in D.C., and he would have been one of those great bass players anywhere else, too.”
From 1989 until they broke up in 1993, Steck played bass for the High Back Chairs, which released one album and several singles on the local Dischord label. Band leader Peter Hayes first met Steck when he shot photos of Hayes’ previous band, Mourning Glories, in 1985. “Charles documented the hell out of High Back Chairs’ brief existence,” says Hayes. “One of my favorite images is on the back of our LP, where three of us have our arms around drummer Jeff Nelson, pretending to help him squeeze a shutter release.” The Highback Chairs reunited once in 2002 for the seventh birthday party of Stecks’ son, Avery.
The High Back Chairs’ melodic approach represented a departure for the hardcore-rooted Dischord. Band guitarist Jim Spellman, best known for a later stint with Velocity Girl, describes the band’s two tours as “somewhat doomed,” but Steck kept everyone in good spirits. Spellman recalls that Steck maintained a sense of humor and took funny pictures of Nelson with various objects on his head. Spellman is one of many friends who praise Steck’s gentle demeanor. “His calmness drew people to him,” Spellman says. “He was a connector.”
D.C.-raised vocalist Husik used Steck’s bass playing on two of her albums, 1995’s Joyride and 1997’s Fly Stereophonic. “Like his pictures, his bass playing and composition were full of heart and soul,” Husik writes in an email. “That soulfulness combined with technical precision creates perfection.”
Musician Scott Wingo was a close friend who played alongside Steck in Rambling Shadows, with Husik, and in the band that changed its name for each one of its six gigs (the One-Nighters, the Two-Timers, Strike Three, Four–Letter Words, High Five, and Deep Six). “Over the course of 40 years, we performed everywhere from the 9:30 Club to the Coney Island Fun House,” Wingo says. According to Wingo, there was no ego in Steck’s musical approach during the inevitable conflicts about artistic direction. “He was an excellent musician…just there to serve the music, standing back in puzzled amusement amid the typical intra-band squabbles…Through it all, he was a constant source of steady calm and reason.”
Steck’s old bandmate Nelson, who is co-owner of Dischord, recalls Steck always carrying a heavy bag with cameras and different lenses in a time before digital photography. Dischord regularly used Steck’s candid photos in its advertising, and he shot many of the label’s publicity photos. “He routinely took photos for free or cheap for those who had no money, such as aspiring bands, or for those people or organizations whom he wanted to help,” Nelson says.
For City Paper, Steck took photos of politicians, musicians, and street scenes for roughly two decades. WCP also published his images of his children, Avery, Brody, and Chloe, at various points in their lives. Former City Paper art director Jandos Rothstein describes Steck as someone who could reliably return from ordinary events such as D.C. Council meetings “and come back with a captivating image.”
From 2009 until his recent surgery, Steck worked at Foggy Bottom’s Pro Photo camera store, where he was popular with customers of varying abilities. “He would restore memories for families and show people how to use cameras that they found in their grandparents’ attic,” says store manager Sally Baghdassarian. “When it came to digital, he was able to out-navigate most photographers with their own camera, showing them where all the settings were and getting them on their way.”
In recent years, the Stecks’ three children have continued the family’s artistic leaning. Avery, 27, plays drums, fiddle, and banjo with the bluegrass band Muddy Branch Boys. Brody, 24, is a singer and guitarist for the local indie rock band Makeup Girl. And Chloe, 22, is a vocalist who occasionally sings backup for Makeup Girl.
Fleming last saw Steck for a 2014 Velvet Monkeys reunion at the annual ShakeMore festival put together by former members of area art punk band Half Japanese in Westminster, Maryland. “The last time I saw Charles, we were playing Velvet Monkeys songs together,” says Fleming. “I’m really happy we were able to do that.”
A memorial service for Charles Steck takes place Aug. 26 at Joe’s Movement Emporium in Mount Rainier. An after-party at the nearby Red Dirt Studio is scheduled to follow. A GoFundMe has been set up to help his family, gofund.me.