One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles "Teenie" Harris
by Stanley Crouch

As a photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the pre-eminent black newsweeklies in America, Charles H. "Teenie" Harris traveled the alleys, workplaces, nightclubs, and neighborhoods of his native Pittsburgh with a Speed Graphic camera in hand. His work, collected in this book for the first time, offers a rare look into the African-American community from the 1930s to the 1970s, during and after the civil rights movement. Whether backstage with Dizzy Gillespie and Lena Horne, in the dugout with Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, or on the streets of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Harris skillfully and enthusiastically documented his beloved community. His images are an important visual history of places we have seldom seen, illustrating the 20th-century black experience in a major American city. Harris’s archive contains over 80,000 images in all (the entire Harris archive was recently bought by the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and they hope to have an exhibition of his work in the future). Stanley Crouch’s essay energetically ties together the disparate issues of African- American history, photography, jazz, baseball, and the history of Pittsburgh that make up Harris’s work, while Deborah Willis’s essay provides a biographical outline of Harris’s career.