The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘He brought out the beauty in people’
As the Civil Rights battle raged, ‘Teenie’ Harris captured the highs and lows of African-American life, says Lucy Davies
Between 1935 and 1975, Charles “Teenie” Harris worked as a photographer for The Pittsburgh Courier, documenting the AfricanAmerican community throughout some of the most transformative years in the city’s history.
“People know the big hits, like slavery, the Jim Crow laws and Civil Rights, but in between that were the highs and lows of real life,” says Charlene FoggieBarnett, who was photographed by Harris many times as a child. “Teenie is the proof of how African Americans actually lived.”
Harris, who died in 1998 at the age of 90, was nicknamed Teenie by a cousin, though he was better known locally as “one shot” for his ability to capture the picture he wanted in a single exposure, while other photographers would hedge their bets with half-adozen shots or more.
Foggie-Barnett’s father was a bishop in the church across the street from the offices of the Courier; Harris would often drop in for a game of table tennis or a sandwich – or to moonlight as a wedding photographer. “My father married everybody,” she tells me. “And Teenie shot everybody.”
Today, Foggie-Barnett, 62, looks after the Teenie Harris archive at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, which acquired nearly 70,000 of his negatives in 2001. Almost 60,000 of them have been digitised and can now be viewed on the museum’s website.
Among Foggie-Barnett’s tasks is identifying and, where possible, interviewing the people seen in Harris’s pictures, a process that can utterly change their meaning. She points out a photograph in which an elderly woman is sitting on a sofa, talking to some young girls. It looks like a charming, everyday scene. “But what happens if I tell you that that old woman was born a slave?” asks Foggie-Barnett. “Suddenly you wonder what it is she’s saying to those girls, don’t you? You long to know.”
Harris’s appetite for photography was, she believes, insatiable. “He shot around the clock: this society lunch, that thing at the mayor’s office, a fire and, on his way to the next assignment, maybe someone he knew out running errands.” At night, he’d head to the clubs. “The rumour was, he’d say ‘Hey, give me three dollars for a beautiful photo of you and your lady enjoying the jazz; five dollars to get rid of it!’ ”
Harris developed every negative himself at home: in one picture of his basement, you can see his children’s train set snaking between stacked boxes of negatives and developing trays. Above them hang drying clothes, on the same wire on which Harris pegged his wet prints.
“This is where it came from – this wonderful collection,” Foggie-Barnett likes to tell photography students who visit for a tour of the archive. “You don’t need fancy equipment.”
Harris’s pictures sometimes provoke charged discussion: “I’ve had visitors ask me things like, ‘Are those her real clothes?’, when they see one of a woman wearing a fox fur or something beautifully tailored,” she says. “Or, ‘I didn’t know black people had cars like this – I thought they just drove cars like this for white people’.”
Harris loved automobiles (before he took up photography, he was listed in the Pittsburgh phone directory as “chauffeur”). Buicks, Chryslers and Duesenbergs all feature in his pictures, lit as carefully as any human portrait. Cars may seem a frivolous thing to be photographing at the height of Civil Rights but, as Pittsburghborn journalist Brentin Mock notes on the museum’s website, for many African Americans they were a symbol of freedom. “Despite all the racial discrimination of the era, we were still going places,” he writes, “and cars were helping us get there”.
Politics comes to the surface in Harris’s photographs of, for example, men and women gathering at Freedom Corner for the 1963 “March on Washington” or of the 1968 riots in Pittsburgh’s Hill District sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King.
“Pittsburgh was a pivotal arena for Civil Rights,” says FoggieBarnett,
whose father was one of the movement’s leaders. “Its position – just over the MasonDixon Line [which in the 19thcentury divided the southern slave states from the northern free states] and on the underground railway meant that a lot of people
‘He’d say, “Give me $3 for a photo of you and your lady enjoying the jazz; $5 to get rid of it”’
It is troublesome for any artist to achieve something so remarkable that it is for that, more or less alone, for which he or she becomes renowned. For example, the full genius of Holst’s music is seldom revealed because so few know it outside The Planets; Wren built extensively, and superbly, beyond St Paul’s; and Leonardo had more to him than the Mona Lisa. To generations, similarly, Alastair Sim will for all time be in drag, as Millicent Fritton, the venal headmistress whom he played so magnificently in the 1954 film The Belles of St Trinian’s.
Sim had another role, in 1951, that is almost as famous, playing Scrooge in the eponymously titled film adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. And one must not forget – not least because this rather second-rate piece of work has, inexplicably, become a staple of the GCSE English syllabus – his rather mystical performance in the title role of the film of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. But most of the rest of Sim’s films lie below the horizon of general recognition, which is a shame, since his name anywhere on a cast list is a guarantee that one is about to be royally amused. Sim is peerless as Scrooge and Miss Fritton, but neither role shows off the full range of his comic talents as well as his best film, The Green Man, a black comedy from 1956, out now in a superb print on Blu-ray. It was made by the team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, and adapted from their own play as so many British films of the 1950s were: they also made the St Trinian’s films.
Sim plays Hawkins, an outwardly respectable middle-aged man living in a smart house in a salubrious part of the stockbroker belt, the sort of place that instantly evokes bridge parties, residents’ associations and an adjoining, very stuffy golf club. Hawkins, indeed, enjoys a Friday evening game of chess with the local police sergeant – whom he rather cruelly defeats with ease, even when his mind is on other things. The most pressing of these other things, we discover, is murder.
For Hawkins is an assassin. An amusing set of vignettes early in the film gives a taste of the life of psychopathy that this mild-mannered man has led since his youth. His next victim is to be a pompous captain of industry, Sir Gregory Upshott, played to a tee by Raymond Huntley.
Hawkins has a magnificent opportunity to perpetrate his act, as he learns that Upshott is taking his young mistress – plucked from the typing pool – to a south coast hotel for a dirty weekend. This, oddly, is the only implausible part of a film that is so entertaining, precisely because everything else in it is so utterly plausible: despite Upshott’s wealth and power, no one would understand why this innocent young woman would want any degree of intimacy at all with him. As well as being old and crusty, he is also odious. In any case, Hawkins intends to plant a bomb in the hotel and bring an end to the romance, and Upshott’s life, right there.
But complications arise. Hawkins has discovered Upshott’s movements by courting his unglamorous secretary to the point where she is expecting him to marry her (something of which, of course, he has no intention). She smells a rat and comes to his house to confront him, where she is intercepted by Hawkins’s sidekick. For the sake of those who have not seen the film, I shall go no further: what follows is chaos of the highest order, and those who wish to experience Sim at his finest have only to wait for his arrival at the hotel and his flirtation with three middle-aged women in the resident string trio.
Besides Sim, the film contains some of the finest comic talents of this supreme era in British cinema. Terry-Thomas fulfils his inevitable destiny as a sportscar-driving tweed-capped flâneur; Colin Gordon, his face far better known than his name, plays a preposterous BBC announcer; Jill Adams, who, had the British film industry not imploded around 1960, would have become a huge star, plays Hawkins’s neighbour. But the other star of the film is the sublime George Cole, effectively Sim’s adopted son in real life, who plays an inept vacuum cleaner salesman who, by a series of accidents, becomes the only person capable of saving Upshott’s life. One would need not just the proverbial heart of stone, but a sensibility of granite not to find this film immensely entertaining.
Sim’s name anywhere on a cast list is a guarantee that one is about to be royally amused