Photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris is known as the top chronicler of Black life and culture in Pittsburgh for most of the 20th century. The Harris archive at the Carnegie Museum of Art includes more than 75,000 of his images. But the full extent of what he documented is still being revealed.
The latest step in that exploration comes Saturday when the Carnegie opens its new gallery exploring Harris’ vast archive. While the museum first devoted permanent space to the archive in 2020, the new gallery is larger and more accessibly located than any previous incarnation. It features images — both still and moving, color and black-and-white — never before exhibited publicly, as well as selections from the museum’s trove of oral histories recalling the people, places and events Harris captured.
“The most exciting part is this is the whole breadth of the catalog,” said Charlene Foggie-Barnett, the museum’s community archivist for the Harris collection. “This is not just a portion of it. This is the first time we’ve had everything Teenie included in the archive in one space.”
The gallery is located on the museum’s second floor. Spacious and outfitted with tables, books and comfortable seating, it displays framed prints of Harris photographs as well as three video projections playing continuous loops mixing his still photos with film clips. Binders on the tables contain themed selections of Harris photos, 1,000 in all. The oral histories are accessible via small speakers activated via QR code.
A particular revelation is the movie footage, most of it never exhibited before. Foggie-Barnett said while Harris made most of his best-known photos for the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper, he seems to have shot the movies out of personal interest.
The footage, shot on 8 mm film in the informal style of home movies, includes everything from scenes of men shoveling snow in the Hill District and sorority girls in red coats crossing a college campus, to scenes of baseball Hall of Famer Josh Gibson at Forbes Field. In one clip, people romp on a beach; in another, burly, beaming auto-repair shop owner Sam “Scotty” Scott works on a car.
The film is only a fraction of hours of footage Harris shot. Much of it came to the museum stored in boxes minimally labeled: “NAACP,” “1957,” “Women,” “YMCA.” As with Harris’ similar unlabeled and often undated photographic negatives, Foggie-Barnett asks anyone with knowledge of the footage to share it with the museum for posterity.
As always, the range of people and scenes Harris photographed provide a sense of the diversity of Black life in Pittsburgh from the 1930s into the ’70s, from Boy Scouts to nightclubs, and from fashion shows and weddings to civil rights rallies. A number of the photos depict Harris and his family at their home on Mulford Street, in Homewood. (The site was recently marked by a state historical marker.)
One of the gallery’s walls is devoted to a “constellation” of Harris’ images, with text explaining how they interrelate: a 1972 visit by Shirley Chisholm to the Loendi social club; a Harris self-portrait from 1975; his basement darkroom; civil rights activist Alma Speed Fox; a Courier pressman at work; Freedom House Ambulance Service; kids getting swimming instruction at Ammon Pool.
Foggie-Barnett, a Pittsburgh native, knew Harris well from childhood. She and her family appear more than once in the archive. One image in the constellation depicts a funeral at Wesley Center AME Zion Church, the Hill District church once run by her father, the Rev. Charles H. Foggie.
Part of the value of the images is that they can counter stereotypical mass media portraits of Black life in decades past, Foggie-Barnett said.
“You’re going to see real lifestyles,” she said. “You’re going to see moments of sadness but you’re mostly going to see moments of Black joy.”
The revamped Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive gallery opens Sat., Nov. 2. A free reception from 2-5 p.m. features live music in the Carnegie Music Hall by local legend Roger Humphries (who as a child Harris photographed playing drums) and his band RH Factor, and guest speakers. More information is here.
