Prometheus 6   

Being born and raised in Pittsburgh PA, I feel a special affinity for this subject. As it says here "Prolific photojournalist and portrait photographer Charles Harris chronicled the African-American community in Pittsburgh for over forty years, producing more than 80,000 images which graphically conveyed the twentieth century black experience to a national audience."

Teenie Harris died on June 12, 1998, two weeks shy of his 90th birthday. I bring this up now because recently a friend alerted me to this web page which includes 200 of Harris' pictures from the documentary, "One Shot - The Life and Work of Teenie Harris." My friend has a personal link to Harris' photography. You see, his aunt appears in one of Harris' most famous photographs. She's the young woman on the far left.

There is another reason I mention Teenie Harris. Here is a man whose career spanned over 40 years and who was one of the most prolific photographers in America, and yet I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT HIM. I'm sorry to say I hadn't even recognized his name. As a white person living in America, I have to say this is just another example of why I feel continually undereducated.

This to me is one of the greatest and worst effects of racism. Invisibility. We've all heard of Ansel Adams. We celebrate the photography of Mathew Brady. The photographic work of Harold Edgerton is internationally known. I'm certain that it isn't just because Teenie Harris was black that his work has been overlooked in mainstream, i.e. "white" circles. But also because he concentrated mainly on black subjects. A double whammy of invisibility. Because you see, we white folks tend not to notice black folks unless they are playing sports, singing and dancing, selling drugs, or moving in next door. Now, granted, white people do all those things too, only we also are permitted to do all sorts of other things too.

OK, that's rather simplistic. And the more I think about it, maybe even untrue. That invisibility I so blithely mentioned seems to really be about an acute racist VISIBILITY. We white people only SEE black people either when they are doing what we expect them to be doing--playing basketball, for instance, or rapping on BET. Or even more acutely, when they're doing something we presumed only white people should be doing.