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.
An alternative history
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Sources
- Source lookupFind
Carnegie Museum of Art
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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
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