Filling in the Blanks: The Teenie Harris Archive Project Continues

Carnegie, Jan/Feb 2004 by Wilson, Ellen S

When most art exhibitions come down-paintings taken off the walls, sculpture packed into custom-made crates-that is the end of them, for that venue. The various pieces travel en masse to the next museum or they go into storage, and privately owned pieces are returned to the lenders. However, when the photographs displayed in Carnegie Museum of Art's Teenie Harris Archive Project were taken off the walls of the Forum Gallery last November, it was more of a beginning than an end.

"This was the first exhibition that I've ever done that had no labels," says Louise Lippincott, curator of Fine Art at Carnegie Museum of Art. "That was deliberate, because we wanted to encourage people to come in and fill in the blanks. And they did. We're beginning a dialogue instead of a lecture."

Charles "Teenie" Harris was the principal photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1975. Considered together, his photographs of special events as well as day-to-day activities constitute one of the most important records of 20th-century African American life. The approximately 80,000 photographic negatives in the Harris archive, however, which Carnegie Museum of Art acquired in 2001, are largely unidentified. The ongoing purpose of the Teenie Harris Archive Project is to gather information about the people, places, and events shown in the photographs.

"The research and the work on this collection have to happen out in the community," says Lippincott. "The show was a pilot project, an attempt to discover if displaying the photographs was a useful way to get information, and it was." Now, through various channels, that work is continuing outside the walls of the museum.

One resource the museum has tapped is the phenomenal memory and connections of John Brewer of the Trolley Station Oral History Center in Homewood. Brewer began his own collection of Teenie Harris photographs about 12 years ago, and is quick to debunk the "One Shot" myth, a nickname given Harris based on his apparent ability to take one photograph-one great photograph-of any scene and move on.

"He was given that name because of how quick he was, but if you've seen the photographs I've seen-and I've seen thousands-you realize there were many shots. He should still be called 'One Shot," because if he was in an environment with a lot of politicians, a tight spot, he didn't have much of an opportunity for a picture. He wasn't the Post-Gazette photographer, for example. He couldn't ask them to wait a second."

Brewer first met Lippincott in March 2003 at an exhibition of Harris' photographs at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild. "They were great photographs," he says, "but no one knew what was in them. There was no real life or history to go with them." As an oral historian with deep roots in Pittsburgh's African American community-his father was the first black school principal in the city-Brewer was able to offer his assistance in identifying some of the scenes and people shown in the photographs, and in assembling groups who could shed more light on the pictures.

One of the groups Brewer has brought to the Trolley Station to study the photographs is The Girlfriends, a group of prominent African American women whose age range, Brewer says, would encompass the relevant era. "At their monthly meetings, we set up photos on a table and just let them go. And they say things like, Oh, this is my father, he was a judge.'" The Girlfriends includes such women as Elaine Effort of KQV, Judge Cynthia Baldwin, and Winifred Tolbert, director of Community Development for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Of the 80,000 Harris negatives in the Museum of Art's collection, 4,000 will eventually be part of the archive project. Those 4,000 images were selected from work prints already in existence, and every month up to 300 of them are added to the Museum of Art's web site for study. In addition, the University of Pittsburgh is putting about 500 of Harris' photographs on its Historic Pittsburgh site, and more opportunities are being sought to display Teenie Harris' photographs throughout the city.

Accessioning the negatives-registering and admitting them to the Museum of Art's permanent collection-is another project altogether. Each one has to be dusted, written up in a condition report, put into an archival sleeve, numbered, and given a descriptive title. Any information on the image must also be transcribed and entered into a database. Scanning the actual images will come later. For now, gathering information about existing photographs is paramount.

While the photographs were on display in the Museum of Art's Forum Gallery, visitors were invited to share their knowledge through "memory sheets" in the gallery or by posting their comments on the museum's web site. More than 1,000 memory sheets were gathered from the two sources by the time the photographs were taken off display. Now, students of Dr. Laurence A. Glasco, a University of Pittsburgh history professor and a member of the Teenie Harris Advisory Committee, are following up on some of these memory sheets, verifying the information provided and trying to collect even more.