Historical photographer honored

PITTSBURGH -- It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that Charles "Teenie" Harris didn't meticulously log much information about the people and places in the tens of thousands of photographs he took.\nHe was probably just too busy, capturing four decades of Pittsburgh history at his studio and for one of the nation's most influential black newspapers.\nHowever, a collaboration by the University of Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Museum of Art, which owns 80,000 Harris negatives, has found answers about hundreds of photos by soliciting oral histories from the public.\nThe goal of the ambitious Teenie Harris Archive Project is to learn as much as possible about as many images as possible. The photos, more in the style of photojournalism than art photography, include images as mundane as old buildings and as shattering as signs with a swastika and racial epithets.\n"People get totally wrapped up in the images themselves. Teenie was very good at capturing character," Louise Lippincott, who curated the project, said. Still, the negatives had virtually no information.\nHarris died at age 89 in 1998, and the museum acquired the negatives from his family in 2001. Lippincott realized that if they were to be cataloged, "We were going to have to speak to a lot of old people really fast."\nTo find the stories behind the images, the project reached out to the public through lectures and slide presentations at area churches and retirement homes. Bound copies of images were also put at libraries and a four-month museum exhibition of more than 300 images developed from the negatives.\nThe exhibition drew the most response, Lippincott said. Although it closed in November, images are continuously being added to the project's Web site.\n"Every time we put new images up, I get 40 or 50 more e-mails and we try to put up about 100 images a month," Lippincott said. "We've gotten them from California, Boston, Texas. ... We've got a national response, which is really staggering."\nInformation about one exhibit photo came from within the museum itself as Lippincott was preparing for its July opening.\nThe black-and-white photo from the early 1960s shows a young man standing behind a bar with his partner, holding a sign reading "NO IRON CITY BEER." One of the men is Hubert Ivey, a part-time museum guard, who was identified in the photo after another guard spotted it at the exhibit.\n"Out of 80,000 (images), I happen to be in one of them and I work right down the stairs," said Ivey, 68.\nIvey remembers the photo was of a "selective buying campaign" that black tavern owners conducted against the Pittsburgh Brewing Co. It probably accompanied a story in the Pittsburgh Courier, the newspaper for which Harris worked. At the time, the brewery employed few blacks, Ivey said, yet nearly every black bar in the city carried Iron City beer.\n"We said, 'If we can't earn any money, we're going to stop spending our money on you,'" Ivey recalled. Eventually, the issue was resolved.\nIn the years since the picture was taken, Ivey's bar burned and Pittsburgh doesn't have the racial problems it once did. But people, especially young people, now ask Ivey about his involvement in the civil rights movement.\n"They don't realize what has changed in Pittsburgh in the last 40 or 50 years," he said. "To them, it's ancient history ... but this has happened in my lifetime."\nThat's exactly the project's value, Lippincott and Larry Glasco, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said.\n"There are just dozens -- hundreds -- of those stories out there," Glasco said.\n"So many people cared about this project," Lippincott said. "There are an awful lot of people around the city who knew Teenie Harris and really loved him. And they've come forward and said, 'We'll do anything in his memory.'"\nThe museum has collected information on about 30 to 40 percent of images displayed at the exhibition and another 1,000 or so included in the binders.\nAs far as Glasco knows, there's never been such a large body of photographs documenting one community so thoroughly. With so many photos, he said, historians will be able to document life in urban America during the time of the photos. "This is a very special and powerful collection of special sources," he said.\n"This whole archive will be searchable on the Web and will be an incredible resource for all kinds of people," Lippincott said, explaining they'll be valuable for social, family or historical research. Harris also documented professional sports, entertainment and politics.\n"He was part of the community... He was an insider and he was deeply inside," Lippincott said.\nOne image Lippincott would like to learn about is of a funeral for an apparently well-loved man named Pig Meat.\n"He was a pimp," Lippincott said with a chuckle.\nJudging by the details -- women in fancy dresses and holding baskets of flowers -- Lippincott said the picture could be from the 1940s. She initially thought it was of an Easter event, but a former Pittsburgh Courier reporter told her otherwise.\n"It has to have been one of the most spectacular funerals that ever occurred in Pittsburgh. Many of his former employees were there ... And the fact that Teenie must have taken at least a dozen photographs indicates that Teenie loved this man," Lippincott said.