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For last week’s paper I reviewed “Teenie Harris, Photographer,” the new show installed into a first-floor hallway at Harold Washington library. Charles “Teenie” Harris shot pictures for the African-American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier in the mid-20th century, focusing particularly on a neighborhood called the Hill District, which was home to a thriving black middle class. Its members are whom Harris is concerned with—though the social upheavals of the 60s and onward lurk in the background of this show, they’re secondary to Harris’s chronicle of black social life. I was struck, looking at the show, at how unusual was this fairly sunny portrait of African-American life—a product of a different sort of urban environment, for sure, but also of the intentions of the person behind the lens, who was, according to his son, “disturbed by the negative manner in which African Americans were depicted by the Hollywood movies and the white press.”
