December 2007
Without uttering a word, Charles “Teenie” Harris, the inspiration for choreographer Ronald K. Brown’s evening-length dance One Shot, spent a lifetime telling the stories of Pittsburgh’s African Americans.
The Pittsburgh native worked for four decades, from the Great Depression to the Civil Rights Movement, for the Pittsburgh Courier, a major African American newspaper. In the process, Harris photographed the rich and the poor, the young and the old, families, athletes, musicians, political leaders, business people, laborers, service workers, and an infinite number of others.
About 80,000 of his photographs are now in the collection of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, which is cataloging and digitizing the images in preparation for a major exhibition that will tour the United States.
“…This archive represents the largest single collection of photographic images of any Black community in the United States—or the world for that matter,” writes Larry Glasco, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh.
“Harris’ photographs have been extolled by The New York Times, exhibited in a number of venues, and made the subject of a recent book and several exhibitions,” Glasco writes. “His photographs are now taking their place alongside those of such eminent photographers as James VanDerZee of New York City’s Harlem. However, in its breadth and in its rich documentation of the life and community spirit of Black urban America, the Teenie Harris collection surpasses that of any other African American photographer. In the long run, his photographs may cause Pittsburgh’s Hill District to join New York City’s Harlem in forming our view of urban Black life from the 1930s to the 1960s.”
Harris was born in 1908 to parents who owned a hotel in the Hill District. By the 1930s he had purchased his first camera and opened a photography studio. His earned a second nickname, “One Shot,” because he avoided having his subjects sit for retakes.
He got the job with the Pittsburgh Courier in 1936 and worked for the newspaper until 1975. He also freelanced for the news picture magazine Flash! based in Washington D.C.
Because he was a photojournalist covering a beat for a city newspaper, Harris was not as celebrated nationally during his lifetime as his African American contemporaries Gordon Parks, famous for his LIFE magazine work, and VanDerZee, a studio photographer in Harlem.
Harris did have an opportunity to photograph famous visitors to his home city, though. He was particularly drawn to musicians. His lens captured the likenesses of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Charlie Parker, Lena Horne, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, and many others. He also photographed presidents and social activists, including John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon.
Harris loved baseball, a fact evident in his photographs of players from Pittsburgh’s legendary Negro League teams—the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords. Harris actually played for the Crawfords before the team became a professional franchise.
But it’s Harris’ photographs of Pittsburghers engaged in the everyday business of living that have made him famous since his death in 1998, and it is those images that will be the backbone of his legacy for generations to come.
Read about Ronald K. Brown, his Evidence dance company, and the dance One Shot.
Search the Carnegie Museum of Art’s online collection to see photographs by Harris.