'Teenie' Exhibit Spans Wide Spectrum

Author: Yvonne Chen

As one enters the Middlebury College Museum of Art's exhibition "Charles 'Teenie' Harris: A Legacy in Black and White," the heyday of Pittsburgh's Hill district fills the room. The 60 photographs on display are just a handful of the nearly 100,000 images of photographer Harris's complete collection, one that scholars have described as "the most comprehensive visual record of any single African-American urban environment."

Henry Simonds '98, curator of the exhibit, introduced the screening of the documentary film he made with producer Ken Love: "One Shot: The Life and Work of Teenie Harris" on the night of Jan. 15. Simonds worked as editor and photo archiver for the film.

Harris, who came from a distinguished African American family in Pittsburgh, first entered photography as a portrait artist for the community in which he lived. He first got the money to start his business from his older brother "Woogie" Harris who was a notorious numbers runner as well as a community hero in the time when the Great Depression and overwhelming segregation still dominated life for black Americans.

Harris later became the chief photographer for The Pittsburgh Courier, during which time he captured over half a century of Pittsburgh's multifaceted character. During a time when even the blood supplies for black and white people were kept separate and black Americans were banned from taking out bank loans — The Courier was one minority newspaper that circulated 14 editions in over 400,000 issues nationwide that catered to the social and political issues ignored by mainstream news, including the integration of the armed services, lynching, Jim Crow laws and, most notably, the double victory campaign which fought for racial democracy at home and abroad during World War II. Harris also started the famed Negro League baseball team, the Pittsburgh Crawfers.

Harris documented a broad range of subjects, as well. From athletes to jazz artists to pictures of ordinary people in everyday walks of life. To name a few: Jackie Robinson, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King Jr., labor activist Nate Smith and his personal favorite Lena Horne, all are included in this exhibition.

Yet we also see private moments of smiling children, ambient jazz audiences and bands, weddings and funerals. Others document political events such as John F. Kennedy's delivering a speech on Capitol Hill and Nixon shaking hands with a peevish voter.

Harris' work is important in that it presents a perspective of the 20th century African American experience that was very different from the negative criminal images that the mass media newspapers disclosed.

Even after being offered more money to work with bigger city newspapers, Harris stayed with the African American community. Although one viewer of the Simond's documentary argued that some contemporary black Americans would disapprove of black peoples' modeling after white standards of dress and lifestyle, the director asserted that these images of the everyday celebrate the positive and common normalcy that blacks lived, and aimed "not to criticize." It was this projection of the "normalcy of black life how pride was developed," says former city editor for the Courier, Edna McKenzie.

Besides serving as a revealing documentation of the "normalcy" of African American life, Harris' work also represents the humble photographer as a gifted artist in his own right.

As evidenced in the "oneness" and engagement of the subject with the camera and his signature "one-shot " approach of taking only one "short and quick" picture of each subject —Harris developed a sensibility for framing and capturing the narrative essence behind each image. Always an active and outgoing participant, his images are full of expression and detail. Most notably are those in which his subjects look into the lens.

One exemplary photo is the "Coal Miner." In this picture, a miner is "isolated in the frame looking engagingly into the camera," says curator of the exhibit Henry Simonds, showing the "lifetime of enduring hardship and experience of life."

Simonds warns against overpoliticizing Harris' work, but he compares Harris' artistic work with that of other documentary photographers of the 1920s and 30s among the ranks of Walker Evans and Brussaunt, both of whom specialized in narrative realism and moved away from pictorialism.

Harris' work can be seen outside of the Middlebury College Museum of Art at the Carnegie Museum of Art located in Pittsburgh. Simonds said he plans to start a production company in the near future and to exhibit his photography. The film "One Shot: The Life and Work of Teenie Harris" has also won the Viewer's Award in the Tahoe International Film Festival.