Change the skin color and these could be my family photographs. My 1960s childhood memories, my dad in the neatly pressed suit, my mom in her pumps and red lipstick. Me, standing against the wall in the church basement, dangling my baby doll by her pink plastic fist.
One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles "Teenie" Harris, on view at the Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts, inspires pure nostalgia for a time when people dressed sharp and smiled big for the camera. Yet memory is jolted by something different about these images from the 1940s through the '60s. In those days, the media seldom showed blacks in ordinary, working- and middle-class settings. Boys playing army, deer hunters, school safety patrols, smiling portraits, beautiful girls adorning brand-new cars. The American dream was not usually depicted in black.
As a photojournalist, Teenie Harris did cover the poverty, injustice and protest of urban blacks, but this exhibition shows predominantly affirmative images of his day. Shooting for the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest circulating black newspaper in the nation at mid-century, Harris documented "The Hill," the famed middle-class black neighborhood in Pittsburgh which blossomed from the time of the underground railroad, through the steel boom and into the age of jazz and the Negro Baseball League. (The area was also famously documented in the plays of the late August Wilson.) The scenes are not much different from the Detroit of my parents' youth, or the blue-collar suburb where I grew up.
The current exhibition is a small sample of the 80,000 images from the Charles "Teenie" Harris Archive, given by the Harris family to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art. Harris' son, called "Little Teenie," speaking at the exhibition's opening, proudly remembered his late father: "My father had a hidden agenda. Disturbed by the negative stereotypes of the blacks in all of the media, he sought to give back to that community their pride and dignity."
The Harris family contributed much to the creation of the unique African-American culture and economy of The Hill. Little Teenie is frank about his family's part in community-building. His uncle William, nicknamed Woogie, was a "benevolent gambler" — a "digitarian," as Pittsburgh Courier editor Robert L. Vann euphemistically called him. Little Teenie (who ironically went on to work for the IRS) sees his uncle's business as a visionary precursor to the lottery. The profits from his numbers business built affordable and often rent-free housing, legitimate black-owned businesses and provided college loans to neighborhood youth. Woogie's brother Teenie had neither the nerves nor the inclination for the numbers racket, but his brother readily gave him the money to establish his photography career.
As the incredible number of images he made attests, the nickname "One Shot" was well earned. As a freelancer, he had to pay for all of his film and materials. His economy of vision can be attributed in part to economic necessity. Throughout his career, his trademark one shot punctuated his arrival and departure at photo-ops. After the flashbulb popped, Harris would catch it as it flew and deposit it in his pocket, and then was off to his next assignment. The pictures in the next day's Courier always captured the essence of an event and the personality of each person.
Little Teenie recalled, "His lens had no limits. He shot entertainers, amateurs and petty criminals. He put women and children on a pedestal. Dad's lens gave equal opportunity. All those who faced it had a feeling of being special."
Harris' photographs often give Pittsburgh and The Hill community a glamorous sheen. The long roster of his famous subjects includes the impossibly beautiful Cassius Clay, the powerful and modest Jackie Robinson, jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. His insightful lens elevated the everyday person and made heroes accessible. In group shots, one looks hard to find the famous face — fans and friends are as well-dressed and interesting as the stars. Athletes and musicians get their due, not yet worshipped and obscenely overpaid as cult figures.
Harris photographed the empty Crystal Barber Shop and Pool Room in their gleaming art deco splendor, looking like perfectly designed 1940s Hollywood movie sets, shinier than any department store window. "Portrait (Woman in Hat and Fur Stole)" shows an unidentified woman of great beauty and hauteur. In her elegant suit, white gloves, fur and dramatic wide-brimmed hat, she is ready for her screen test.
"One Shot" Harris showed the world real faces of black America — pictures startling in the normalcy of the everyday life they captured. He also documented the realities of prejudice, poverty and the struggles for desegregation and justice that characterized the time. Family portraits in slum interiors are all the more heart-rending for the contrast to the hopeful images of middle-class black life that predominate in this exhibition. The separate but not always equal division of black and white culture remains inescapable.
Boyzell Hosey, a photography editor for the St. Petersburg Times, visited the opening and added some historic continuity to Little Teenie's reminiscences. Hosey, a Pittsburgh native, was the first person to put together a gallery exhibition of Harris' work. The work was shown at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild in 1988, an educational center for black culture in Pittsburgh. Hosey remembers the venerable Harris visiting and critiquing the work of his photography students.
As the young photographers showed Harris the hundreds of images they had taken, Harris just laughed and told them, "It only takes one shot."
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.