Charles "Teenie" Harris

Charles "Teenie" Harris was born on the second of July 1908 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to William F. "Monk" Harris and Ella Mae "Olga" Taliaferro Harris. He grew up in the Hill District, the beating heart of Black Pittsburgh, where his family kept the Masio Hotel on Wylie Avenue — a boarding house that sheltered newcomers arriving in the great migration from the South.

A gifted athlete who played semiprofessional baseball and basketball, Harris was largely self-taught with a camera. In the early 1930s he opened his own studio and began selling images to the Pittsburgh Courier and the picture magazine Flash! His speed and instinct earned him the nickname "One Shot," for he rarely asked a subject to sit for a second frame.

From 1936 to 1975 Harris served as staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most influential Black newspapers. Across four decades he chronicled his community in full — its churches and ballfields, its parlors and street corners, its weddings and protests — alongside the luminaries who passed through, among them Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, and Joe Louis.

He left behind some eighty thousand negatives, acquired in 2001 by the Carnegie Museum of Art, which built the Teenie Harris Archive to preserve them. Charles "Teenie" Harris died in Pittsburgh on the twelfth of June 1998. In the honest, unhurried dignity of his frames, an entire people saw itself remembered — and remembered whole.