Harris, Charles “Teenie”
1908-1998 · Contribution: 1937-1975
Newspaper photographer
Spent roughly four decades as staff and freelance photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, amassing an archive of nearly 80,000 images — now held by the Carnegie Museum of Art — that forms one of the largest and richest visual chronicles of 20th-century Black urban life in the United States
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Quick facts
- Born
- 1908, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Active since
- 1937
- Category
- Press & Photography
- Best known for
- The Pittsburgh Courier's chronicler of Black urban life
Impact on the world
Harris built one of the largest and richest visual chronicles of 20th-century Black urban life in America, documenting Pittsburgh's Hill District with equal care for the famous and the everyday.
Sources
- Carnegie Museum of Art
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Chronicled Harlem community life for nearly six decades as a studio and freelance photographer, building an archive of more than 500,000 portraits — now held primarily at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture — documenting everyone from working-class families to Haile Selassie, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Roberts, Richard Samuel
1880-1936
Operated a Columbia, South Carolina, portrait studio from 1922 to 1936 that produced what became, after a chance 1977 rediscovery of his glass-plate negatives, the most comprehensive surviving photographic record of a Southern Black middle class community in the early 20th century
Vann, Robert Lee
1879-1940
Built the Pittsburgh Courier from a struggling startup into the largest African American newspaper in the country, reaching a circulation of 250,000 by 1938, and helped engineer the historic 1932 shift of Black voters from the Republican to the Democratic Party
Withers, Ernest Columbus Sr.
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Photographed nearly every major event of the Southern civil rights movement over a 60-year career, including the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the “I Am a Man” Memphis sanitation strike, while also — as revealed decades after his death — secretly reporting information about the movement to the FBI