Sometime in the middle of the last century, Charles “Teenie” Harris became known for often taking only one picture of his subjects, and was aptly nicknamed “One Shot” by the former mayor of Pittsburgh David L. Lawrence. “He was fast,” Charlene Foggie-Barnett, the Teenie Harris community archivist at the Carnegie Museum of Art, told me over Zoom in late October 2022. “He’d run in and say, ‘Get together, everybody, I’m only gonna take one shot.’” With a determined energy, Harris took “one shot” many, many times in his long career, capturing the ordinary beauty of Black life in the city.
Professionally, Harris started out at the Washington, DC–based , but he had been exposed to photography since he was a small child. For more than forty years, Harris was the leading photographer for the , one of the country’s largest Black newspapers. At the , he worked on assignments ranging from the civil rights movement (protests, rallies, and marches) to local events such as birthdays, community meetings, cultural programs, and sports activities. Intersecting with the lives of innumerable Pittsburgh residents as a street photographer, studio photographer, and photojournalist, he made note of what he saw as a member of Pittsburgh’s Black communities, touching on themes of sexuality, religion, intimacy, memory,
