Harris, Charles “Teenie”

Impact on the world

Nicknamed “One Shot Harris” by Pittsburgh’s mayor for his ability to capture a usable image in a single frame, Harris photographed everyone from Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Jackie Robinson, and Muhammad Ali to ordinary weddings, funerals, Negro League ballgames, and street life in his native Hill District for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most influential Black newspapers. He filed a lawsuit shortly before his death over unpaid royalties from unauthorized reproductions of his work known as “Morgan prints” and won the case posthumously; in 2001 the Carnegie Museum of Art purchased his full negative collection from his estate, and ongoing digitization and community-identification projects have made his archive a cornerstone resource for the history of Black Pittsburgh, earning him induction into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2005.

Life & background

Born July 2, 1908, in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where his family ran a boarding hotel for Black migrants from the South, Harris was a self-taught photographer who first supported himself playing semi-professional baseball and basketball — he helped establish the Negro League’s Pittsburgh Crawfords — before beginning to sell photographs to Flash magazine and the Pittsburgh Courier in 1937. He opened his own Harris Studio in the Hill District in 1938, joined the Courier’s staff around 1941, and continued photographing the paper’s coverage for roughly four decades before retiring in the mid-1970s; he died in Pittsburgh on June 12, 1998, at age 89.

Sources

1. Carnegie Museum of Art; BlackPast.org; Pennsylvania Center for the Book