How the other half lived

By Y.F. | PITTSBURGH

EVERY grand city—and Pittsburgh was indeed once grand—should have a photographer like Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908-1998). Many 20th-century photographers seized on Pittsburgh as a metaphor for the ravages of industry and the paradoxes of American post-war optimism and mass-production. Images of smokestacks, scruffy labourers and industrial vistas contributed to “the popular image of Pittsburgh as a rough, tough, hard-working city of few amenities and pleasures,” writes Alan Trachtenberg, a historian of American photography at Yale.

In their ambition to cast Pittsburgh as steel mills with human parts, most photographers overlooked the more discrete elements of Pittsburgh's communities. Harris filled in these gaps with pictures of life as it was actually lived. His Pittsburgh is humane and warm-blooded, not merely a visual proxy for the modern human condition. His subjects, chronicled over half a century, are individuals and communities in and around Pittsburgh's predominantly black Hill District, where he was born and raised. The result is a body of work that poignantly reflects the beauties and tensions of the time.

The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh recently staged a comprehensive and highly engaging show of Harris's work, marking a significant tribute to his career and legacy. The exhibit and excellent accompanying catalogue have supplied pieces that often seem missing from the story of mid-century America: the parallel worlds that black Americans cultivated, glorious in themselves but set apart frome the more visible white mainstream. Harris did not set out with an explicit political agenda, but his photos convey a willful optimism, a sense of lives led led fully, despite the many obstacles.

Harris's subjects came from the fabric of his own world. As a resident of the Hill District—which in the 1940s and '50s was as much a destination for the black elite as Harlem and Chicago—Harris was also one of its central characters. The influx of blacks from the south during the first Great Migration coincided with the speakeasy culture of the Prohibition era, and helped inspire the pulsating rhythm of life in the Hill District.These speakeasies (many of them run by Harris's brother Woogie) provided the setting for many of Harris's celebrity shots. On any given night at the famous Crawford Grill one could spot Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Charlie Parker or Josephine Baker. Other patrons included some Negro League stars, Satchell Paige and Josh Gibson, and later on Roberto Clemente. Muhammad Ali and Joe Louis also made a habit of stopping by.

A bit of a dandy himself, Harris was quiet but disarmingly charming. Between his local roots and natural ease, he was able to gain access to pretty much anyone who came through Pittsburgh in those years.

In 1941 the Pittsburgh Courier, the nation's top black newspaper, hired Harris as its first staff photographer, confirming his role as the chronicler of the Hill and of black America more generally, given the paper's national readership. In the 1960s and 70s, as the civil-rights movement and push for real integration took hold, his photos began documenting the seamier side of segregation, the disparity between white and black America. Taken together, Harris's images offer an intimate survey of black urban America over much of the 20th century.

Such is the treasure of Harris's work. Graced with this immense and important archive, the Carnegie Museum should be applauded for giving it the attention it deserves.