The Amon Carter Museum of Art exhibit, “Black Photojournalism,” will examine Black American life and will run from March 15 to July 5. A photo from Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908–1998) shows a Pittsburgh Courier press operator, possibly William Brown, printing newspapers, possibly for a Midwestern edition, 1954.
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
This weekend marks the opening of the Amon Carter Museum of Art exhibit “Black Photojournalism,” which showcases Black photojournalists and their work documenting Black American life over four decades.
Organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art, the exhibit showcases 60 photographers and over 250 photographs from 1945 to the mid-1980s, featuring photographers working at various Black media outlets who documented the Black American experience, an experience widely ignored by mainstream white-owned newspapers.
Charles Wylie, the museum’s curator of photography, says the exhibit highlights the centrality of the Black experience in American history, from the tragedies to the mundaneness of family life. The work of the Black photographers was not published by white media outlets, but was featured by publications such as the Atlanta Daily World, the Chicago Defender, and Ebony.
“There is an important element of not just showing the tragedies and the dire circumstances, obviously, that there was and is a really vital, strong,” Wylie said. “And, in many ways, there’s a lot of joy in these communities that you see.”
The exhibit was co-organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and Charlene Foggie-Barnett, the community archivist of the Charles “Teenie” Harris archive. Harris was a longtime photographer for a Black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier, whose archive spans over 70,000 images of the Black urban experience.
Leers and Foggie-Barnett used Harris’ archive as an inspiration to examine what was happening in Black communities across the nation. They also used material from Black-owned media in cities that helped transform how Black people see themselves and their communities.
The exhibit features how a photograph is taken in the practice of journalism and how it is printed in a newspaper. Another feature of the exhibit showcases photos with editorial marks on cropping and how the photographs were used to record major events and everyday life in Black communities.
One of the photojournalists whose work is in the exhibit is Kwame Brathwaite, who was part of a cultural movement in the ‘50s and ‘60s that coined the term, “Black is Beautiful.” Another photographer whose work is displayed is Ernest C. Withers, who documented some of the most iconic moments of the civil rights movement.
The Carter Museum also partnered with the Fort Worth History Center to provide a number of archival materials, photographs, and facsimiles of the Como Weekly, a Black newspaper in the Lake Como community that ran from 1940 until 1986.
The exhibit will run from March 15 to July 5, and members will have early preview days on March 13 and 14. Admission is free.
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Kamal Morgan covers racial equity issues for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He came to Texas from the Pensacola News Journal in Florida. Send tips to his email or Twitter.