Kale Serrato Doyen

The Teenie Harris Archive at the Carnegie Museum of Art chronicles mid-century Black life in Pittsburgh from the photographic perspective of Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908-1998). From the 1930s-80s, Harris worked as a studio photographer and photojournalist for the Black newspaper, “The Pittsburgh Courier,” capturing over 70,000 images of newsworthy and everyday life in “Pittsburgh’s Harlem”—the historic Hill District neighborhood. Many of the places that Harris pictured exist now only in archival and communal memory, having been razed as part of the city’s urban renewal and suburbanization efforts. In response to this systemic and ongoing erasure, this dissertation digitally maps historic photographs from the Teenie Harris Archive in conversation with local community members. By reactivating Harris’s photographs in community and in situ, this study investigates structural racism, displacement, and their impacts on Pittsburgh's built environment.

This project uses the photographic archive of Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1908-1998, to chart a Black geography of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From the 1930s-1980s, Harris chronicled the lives of Black communities in Pittsburgh as a studio photographer and photojournalist for the Black newspaper, “The Pittsburgh Courier.” This dissertation provides an interactive, web-based map of photographs from the Teenie Harris Archive. This new modality highlights the spatial framework underlying Harris’s photographs of twentieth-century social phenomena such as racial segregation, urban renewal, displacement, and resistance. The lingering impacts of these inequities persist today in the form of gentrification, and collaboration with local community members enables this project to recover histories of Pittsburgh’s Black built environment that have been systemically erased from modern-day maps.