The Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive is a living resource of 20th-century American life as seen through the lens of Charles “Teenie” Harris and activated by the participation of the Pittsburgh community and dedicated museum staff. The archive primarily consists of over 75,000 black-and-white and color negatives that comprise Harris’s work as a photojournalist, studio owner, and artist. In addition, nearly 5,000 feet of 16mm motion picture film includes original footage, spliced with commercial newsreel and cartoon footage from the 1940s and 1950s.
In 2001, Carnegie Museum of Art purchased the negatives and all rights from the artist’s family and formed an initial advisory committee of Harris family members, academics, and Pittsburgh community leaders, who have since informed how the museum stewards the archive. In addition to this group’s specialized knowledge, many more archive users and stakeholders from a range of lived experiences have helped identify people, places, and events depicted in the photographs over the years. Critical details based on first-person accounts and cutline information found in Harris’s professional work with Flash, a weekly news picture magazine based in Washington, DC, and the Pittsburgh Courier also inform the archive’s catalogue information.
As was common with newspaper photographers, Harris did not title individual images. For cataloguing and identification purposes, museum staff have assigned descriptions to the photographs based on their content. Beginning in 2005, archivists began gathering oral histories from people whose lives have intersected with Harris’s or the subjects of his images. The archive now holds over 60 oral histories. This important resource is of unparalleled value to historians, authors, film, television, and theater producers, documentarians, educators, students, and, most importantly, Pittsburgh’s African American community from which it originated.
Today, Carnegie Museum of Art continues the work of identifying and updating the archive’s information through connecting with researchers and people whose experiences and familial memories are reflected in the photographs the museum stewards. The Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive is open to all visitors who want to access it for personal, scholarly, and artistic projects.