Charles "Teenie" Harris
| Charles "Teenie" Harris | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 2, 1908 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
| Died | June 12, 1998 (aged 89) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | Photographer |
| Spouse(s) |
Ruth M. Butler (1927–circa 1933) Elsa Lee Elliott (1944–1997) |
| Children |
Charles A. Harris Ira Vann Harris (b. 1944) Lionel L. Harris (b. 1945) Crystal Harris (b. 1951) Cheryl A. Harris (b. 1954) |
| Parent(s) |
William Franklin “Monk” Ella Mae “Olga” Taliaferro Harris |
Ruth M. Butler (1927–circa 1933)
Charles A. Harris
Ira Vann Harris (b. 1944)
Lionel L. Harris (b. 1945)
Crystal Harris (b. 1951)
William Franklin “Monk”
Charles "Teenie" Harris (July 2, 1908–June 12, 1998) was an accomplished African-American photographer.
Harris was born in 1908 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, the son of hotel owners in the city's Hill District. Early in the 1930s he purchased his first camera and opened a photography studio. He freelanced for the Washington, D.C. news picture magazine, Flash!. From the 1936 to 1975 Harris chronicled life in the black neighborhoods of the city for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of America's oldest black newspapers. He was nicknamed "One Shot" because he rarely made his subjects sit for retakes. Harris took more than 80,000 images during his career. The body of his work constitutes arguably the largest and most complete photographic documentation of a minority community in the United States.
Unlike his more celebrated African-American contemporaries, such as James Van Der Zee, known for studio portraits, or Gordon Parks, who traveled widely as a photojournalist, Harris was a working-class photographer tethered to a job with a circumscribed beat. His work was rarely seen outside of Pittsburgh, until after his death in 1998.
In addition to his photo essays of daily life in the city, he captured many celebrities who visited Pittsburgh, e.g. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, Sam Cooke, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Charlie Parker, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Dizzy Gillespie.
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