Higgins, Chester Jr.
1946-present · Contribution: 1969-2014
Spent nearly four decades as a New York Times staff photographer while producing an acclaimed body of work documenting the global African diaspora, published in books including Feeling the Spirit (1994) and Echo of the Spirit (2004)
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
Mentored at Tuskegee Institute by official campus photographer P.H. Polk, also profiled in this collection, and later by Life photographer Gordon Parks and Look’s Arthur Rothstein, Higgins set out to counter what he described as a media landscape lacking “decency, dignity and virtuous character” in its images of Black people. During his 1975-2014 tenure at The New York Times, he ensured images of Kwanzaa and other Black cultural traditions appeared regularly in the paper, and since his first trip to Senegal in 1971 he has traveled to Africa roughly 50 times to document what Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch called “an Africa that has a spirit of hope” connecting the continent to the African American experience. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art, and in 2022 he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.
Life & background
Born November 1946 in Fairhope, Alabama, and raised in New Brockton, Higgins graduated from Tuskegee Institute in 1970 with a business management degree after being mentored in photography there by P.H. Polk starting in 1967. He moved to New York, freelanced for major picture magazines through the late 1960s and early 1970s, and joined The New York Times as a staff photographer in 1975, remaining until 2014; he has published more than half a dozen photography books and continues to live and work in Brooklyn with his wife and collaborator, writer Betsy Kissam.
Sources
- NPR; African American Registry; ASMP New York
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