The project quickly grew, and by the time Daniels died of pneumonia this past January, it had garnered international headlines and raised more than $75,000 via GoFundMe to digitize more than 90,000 images.
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“We kept finding more film,” Daniels’s longtime partner, Susan Berstler, said during a recent tour of the exhibition. “We still have another batch.”
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In the meantime, Berstler has organized “To Be Continued: Photographs by Charles Daniels,” an exhibition of about 50 prints (plus a 1,000-image slideshow) at Somerville’s Nave Gallery. The show, which was originally scheduled to close in early June, has been extended through the month, with a closing reception on the 26th, because “Charles would have wanted a party.”
Daniels is known mainly for his rock photography, and the exhibition is rich with fresh images of Mick Jagger, Jeff Beck, Wood, Wolf, and Stewart, among others.
Still, the Master Blaster considered himself primarily a street photographer. He took his camera everywhere, and “To Be Continued” abounds with street scenes in and around Boston. There are images of women wearing the latest London fashions in Harvard Square, mud-caked boys in Gloucester, and political protests in Cambridge, each a window into a specific moment in the region’s history.
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Particularly meaningful to Berstler are a series of portraits Daniels took of his mother and grandmother, which she’s placed in the center of the gallery.
“His mom was his anchor,” said Berstler, who added that Daniels declined jobs offers to emcee in London clubs. She’s convinced he wanted to stay near his mother. “People were like, ‘Why didn’t you go to London?’” she said. “It was totally his mother.”
Born in rural Alabama, Daniels arrived in Roxbury in the 1950s, eventually becoming a counterculture fixture in Harvard Square. He was close friends with Wolf, who dubbed him the “Master Blaster” (Daniels in turn nicknamed Wolf the “Woofa Goofa”).
As the voguish emcee at the Tea Party, Daniels befriended numerous British touring acts, along the way securing a front row seat to rock ’n’ roll history.
“Charlie captured it all, because he was constantly clicking away,” Wolf told the Globe in 2022. “He was a cultural archivist without even knowing it.”
His friendship with Wood led him to go on tour with Faces in the 1970s; he later traveled with the Rolling Stones, joining Wood on his first tour with the group in 1975.
Daniels continued shooting in the decades that followed, photographing street scenes, dance performances, protests, and portraits.
One thing he did not do, however, was develop his film.
“I didn’t need to see the final result as much as I just thought I needed to pay attention,” he told the Globe during the 2022 interview. “It was more or less like being in the middle of it as opposed to really finishing it off.”
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But that began to change as he grew older and developed a blood disorder.
Originally, he and Berstler had planned “To Be Continued” to open in May 2023. But they postponed the show when Daniels’s condition worsened, requiring frequent transfusions at the hospital.
“I wanted to have the show so Charles could see the work on the walls,” said Berstler, who runs the gallery, housed in the city’s Clarendon Hill Presbyterian Church. “That didn’t happen, but I felt like it was important to move forward.”
She ultimately opened the show as part of this year’s Somerville Open Studios, in part to thank people who had helped finance the project.
“I wanted the people at the GoFundMe to realize that they made this possible,” she said, adding that her partner of roughly 35 years helped choose the photographs. “I wanted them to have a chance to see it and experience it and see what they were responsible for.”
Berstler added that several curators have come through the show, and she’s now discussing possible future exhibitions with local and international institutions.
“The sad thing about the GoFundMe and all this is that it didn’t happen five or 10 years ago,” she said. “That’s just the sadness that I have to deal with.”
Still, the vast majority of Daniels’s work came very close to never being seen, said Berstler, and he was moved by the outpouring of support toward the end of his life.
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“I think Charles died feeling very appreciated and loved, like his work meant something,” she said. “For an artist, I don’t think you can ask for more than that.”
TO BE CONTINUED: PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLES DANIELS
155 Powder House Blvd., through June 23 (closing reception June 26). Check website for hours: www.navegallery.org
Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com. Follow him @malcolmgay.
