Charles Harris

Charles Harris was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and began photographing in the early 1930s.

He opened a photography studio in his home city with $350 he borrowed from his brother. In 1936 he joined the staff of thePittsburgh Courier, one of the few black-owned weekly newspapers at that time to have a national circulation, and quickly built an unprecedented rapport with Pittsburgh’s African-American community. He worked for that newspaper until 1975, including the era when it was the nation’s biggest black newspaper.

He turned to photography in the late 1930s, specializing in glamour portraits. By 1941, he was also freelancing for the Pittsburgh Courier, the leading African American newspaper of the era. In 1953, he closed his studio to concentrate on photojournalism and he became a nationally respected news photographer before retiring around 1975. Harris’s life work chronicles a typical, vibrant black urban community during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras.

His images capture the “dailiness” of common experience, as well as the exceptional personalities who shaped the 20th century: entertainer Lena Horne, baseball star Jackie Robinson, and leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Harris’s oeuvre runs the gamut from formal portraits to crime scenes to streetscapes to news events, all distinguished by his aesthetic sensibility—great rapport with his human subjects, strong compositional sense, and an uncanny awareness of the telling activities at the margins. The result is a unique view of American black life and culture seen from the inside and after hours.

Harris’ images created a historically and sociologically accurate record of African-American history from 1931 to 1971, chronicling life through the complicated era of desegregation and again into the time of re-segregation. He is also known for his work as a photographer of Negro League baseball. The dapper photographer whose thousands of images captured celebrities and chronicled decades of black life in Pittsburgh died two weeks shy of this 90th birthday at the house where he had lived most of his life.

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