Hansen, Austin

Impact on the world

Hansen sold his first photographs — hurricane damage in the Virgin Islands and Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic-flight stopover there — as a teenager, then broke into New York journalism after a photo he took of a young woman singing for Eleanor Roosevelt sold to the New York Amsterdam News for two dollars. Operating a studio on West 135th Street in Harlem for 47 years, he served for decades as the official photographer of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and documented events at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, while freelancing for the Amsterdam News, the People’s Voice, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender; his 1989 Schomburg Center retrospective, “Hansen’s Harlem,” established him alongside James Van Der Zee as one of the community’s foremost visual chroniclers.

Life & background

Born January 28, 1910, in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, Hansen began taking photographs at age twelve while apprenticing under the island’s official photographer and moved to New York in 1928, where racist hiring practices confined him to work as a dishwasher and elevator operator despite strong references from his Navy service. He opened his first Harlem studio on West 116th Street in the 1930s and his long-running studio on West 135th Street in 1940, interrupted only by wartime service as a Navy photographer’s mate and a postwar stint as an Office of War Information darkroom technician; he continued photographing as artist-in-residence at the Photographic Center of Harlem in his final years and died in New York City on January 23, 1996, just days before his 86th birthday.

Sources

1. New York Public Library (Schomburg Center); EBSCO Research Starters; New York Times obituary