‘Love for Teenie Harris’ shown at Mt. Lebanon Public Library
Harry Funk / The Almananc
Charlene Foggie-Barnette is archive specialist for the Teenie Harris collection at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
By Harry Funk/Staff writer/hfunk@thealmanac.net
Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908-98) took many self-images as a way to test his photography process.
(Carnegie Museum of Art)
As far as young Charlene Foggie was concerned, he was the ubiquitous man with the camera.
“Teenie was constantly doing things at our church or at our home. He photographed family weddings, and anything that happened, Teenie seemed to be there,” she recalled. “And for everybody I knew at the time, when I was little, that was commonplace. Teenie was just part of our everyday lives.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Charlene Foggie-Barnett speaks at Mt. Lebanon Public Library.
For the better part of half a century, Charles Harris (1908-98) – everyone knew him by his childhood nickname – visually chronicled Pittsburgh’s African-American community, from the influential and famous to the average and ordinary.
As archive specialist for the Teenie Harris collection at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Charlene Foggie-Barnett has the goal of putting names to the vast majority of the 80,000 images for which the subjects’ identities remain unknown.
“One of the other things that Teenie does for us is he is giving evidence of how society really was,” the Hill District native told the audience gathered during Black History Month at Mt. Lebanon Public Library for a “Love for Teenie Harris” program.
Primarily through his work as a principal photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, Harris has gained acknowledgement as having contributed perhaps the most complete photographic documentation of a minority community in the United States. And Foggie-Barnett was right smack in the middle of it.
“I had known Teenie almost my whole life,” she said, “and almost all my pictures hanging on the wall were shots Teenie took of me as a baby, or my parents and me.”
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Charlene Foggie-Barnett speaks about the cultural significance of Teenie Harris’ photography.
Bishop Charles Foggie was a frequent subject, having served in such capacities as president of NAACP Pittsburgh and the first black board member of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and his wife, the former Madeline Sharpe, often was by his side.
As for photography, Harris received informal training from his grandfather and decided on using a camera for his career after doing a bit of work for his brother, William “Woogie” Harris, who was “what we call a numerologist,” Foggie-Barnett said as a polite way to term a person who ran numbers games.
“This was a necessary evil for the Hill District and for all of Black America, actually,” she said, explaining that banks of the time were “not going to offer you a car loan or a home loan or an education loan or a business loan, but these guys would. And so they kept the society afloat.”
Teenie’s choice of professions led him to the likes of Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball games, to the legendary Crawford Grill and other entertainment venues, and regularly to the office of Mayor David L. Lawrence, who gave Harris his other nickname: “One Shot.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Charlene Foggie-Barnett speaks at Mt. Lebanon Public Library about the photography of Charles “Teenie” Harris.
“Other photographers would come in and set up tripods, and they had all their equipment and were taking up time. Teenie would come in and kind of walk around a little bit, and he’d just get the shot, close it all up, and he was out,” Foggie-Barnett said, explaining that the publications for which he worked financed none of his supplies. “They paid for the finished product, which was the image.”
Some of the shots, it turns out, apparently never were intended for publication. As Foggie-Barnett revealed:
“The story is that Teenie would be, say, at the Crawford Grill at night, and he’d take a bunch of photos, go home, grab a cheese sandwich and go down in his basement,” to his darkroom. “He’d go back to the Crawford Grill and say, ‘Hey, you want this picture? It’ll be five bucks.’
“He made some extra money that way, but rumor has it that he made a lot more money because people would say, ‘I’ll give you 10 to destroy it.'”
For more information, visit teenie.cmoa.org.