At the end of World War II, Black service members returned home from overseas where they had fought against fascism and imperialism and for democracy. But the country they returned to was one where they did not have equal rights to those of the white soldiers they had fought with.
At the same time, the media landscape was also growing, allowing for Black stories told by Black journalists with Black photojournalists supplying the photographs. These photographs are not just scenes of historic events in the country’s history, but a window into the Black experience in America. “The post-war period was an incredibly important one, not just because of a real boom in Black-owned media at that time, because you had magazines like Ebony and Jet coming on around the same time, and very widely circulated papers like the New York Amsterdam News and The Pittsburgh Courier,” tells curator Dan Leers of the Carnegie Museum of Art. “So that felt like a good place to start.”
The exhibition “Black Photojournalism,” on view through January 19, 2026, explores the role that Black Photojournalists played in chronicling historic events and daily life from the end of World War II through Jesse Jackson’s Presidential Campaign in 1984 using the Museum’s Charles “Teenie” Harris archive as a starting point. That archive contains over 75,000 black-and-white and color negatives that comprise Harris’ work as a photojournalist, studio owner, and artist in Pittsburg. The archive was purchased by the museum in 2001, which then began organizing and cataloging it.
“I began to ask questions about the kind of networks that I figured Harris and the other journalists and editors and publishers in his, at his paper and others had. It didn’t take a lot of digging to realize that there were Black-owned newspapers hiring journalists and photographers in every major city,” Leers explains about how the exhibition was formulated. “And so, it felt like simultaneously, as we are re-evaluating the Harris Archive and understanding its meaning and its relevance to our audiences here in Pittsburgh, we also wanted to think about how it resonates beyond Pittsburgh. This felt like a great way to start to think about those connections that were happening across the country, and honestly across the world in a lot of ways.”
During the decades covered in the exhibition, newspapers like the Afro American News, Atlanta Daily World, Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender, transformed how the Black population were able to see themselves and their communities in the press, with several hundred thousand readers each at the peaks. They were not dependent on the mainstream media to tell their stories: they were able to tell them themselves.
The photographs are not just about the social changes, civil rights advocacy, and political upheaval in the time between 1945 and 1984. They were also about the in-between stories including fraternal organizations, civic moments, and social events which were all covered by the photographers in the exhibit. They are Black joy in print: the daily life of the Black community, even if some of the subjects are famous.
“Lena Horne is not dressed up in her glamorous outfits. She’s doing civil rights work in the 60s and 70s with the NAACP,” tells Charlene Foggie-Barnett, the Charles “Teenie” Harris community archivist. “You have interesting photos of Dr. King in the Lorraine Motel reading about himself in the hotel that he subsequently assassinated in. But we then have other photos of him playing with his children and a bunch of hula hoops.”
The photographs in the exhibition have been drawn from archives and collections in the care of journalists, libraries, museums, newspapers, photographers, and universities across the country. “The thing that we are quick to say is that we didn’t discover any pictures for this exhibition. There were always either photographers, archivists, publishers who were keeping track of these things, who knew what they had,” Leers explains. “It just wasn’t being showcased in a museum context, and so that’s another reason why we really want to elevate the work of archivists and curators because they’re the ones who are the real content experts. They know what they have, and they know how valuable it is.”
The original work prints in the exhibition were circulated and reviewed in publishing offices before anything went to print. Each one represents the energy of many dedicated individuals who worked to get out the news every single day. One picture leads to another, making visible multiple experiences of history while proposing ways of understanding today as tomorrow is being created. The exhibition will live on once it closes at the museum and the works are all returned to their homes. There is an accompanying book published this month of December. It includes the work of 57 photographers, and essays by numerous scholars that expands on what is presented in the gallery.
The museum also launched a podcast in November, which houses the voices and stories of the photographers, journalists, and publishers who are still alive. This includes, for example, Savannah Wood, the fifth generation of a family that runs the Afro-American newspaper. Together, the podcast and the publication allow the information from these archives to continue to tell the story of the Black photojournalists for future generations of scholars, academics, and the public. They also allow the stories of Black communities to live on as told by those from the communities themselves.
“Black Photojournalism” is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania through January 19, 2026.
The accompanying publication can be purchased through the Carnegie Museum Store for $65. Listen to the podcast here.
