One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles "Teenie" Harris

From the 1930s to the 1970s, Charles "Teenie" Harris traveled the alleys, workplaces, nightclubs, and streets of his native city of Pittsburgh with a Speed Graphic camera in hand. Working first as a freelancer, then as a staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the preeminent black news weeklies in America, Harris ceaselessly chronicled half a century of African-American life. His work, collected for the first time in this book, offers a rare look into the African-American community during and after the Civil Rights movement.Although he was given the nickname "One Shot" by Mayor David L. Lawrence because of his habit of snapping only one shot when other photographers shot many, Harris's archive is breathtaking in scope, containing more than 80,000 images. Among the most life-affirming photographs are those depicting children, couples, and families. There are also proud images of people at work: a coal miner, an auto mechanic, a barber, a cobbler. American presidents are in the collection, as are Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali. Jazz greats inlude Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Louis Armstrong. Although many of Harris's photographs reveal rich lives led with pride, some capture lives in grim circumstances, filled with poverty, crime, violence, and death.Accompanying the illustrations is an essay by cultural critic Stanley Crouch, who weaves together such wide-ranging and disparate topics as American history, baseball, jazz, the growth of the street industry, and African-American culture. Always brilliant and ever surprising, Crouch helps us understand this invaluable collection of work. Historian Deborah Willis provides a biographical outline of the rediscovered artist, now poised on the threshold of prominence in modern American photography. This book offers an important visual history of places and people we have seldom seen, illustrating and revealing the breadth of black urban experience in mid-twentieth century America.