This exhibition excavates four decades of Black life in the US

Black Photojournalism is a truly vast new show occupying three prodigious exhibition rooms of Pittsburgh’s illustrious Carnegie Museum of Art. Through a constellation of pictures, it tells a story about the intersection of historical events and everyday life in America from the conclusion of World War II in 1945, through the civil rights movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, concluding with the presidential campaigns of 1984. Drawing as it does on archives and collections from across the US, and incorporating the work of nearly 60 photographers, curators Dan Leers and Charlene Foggie-Barnett could’ve made multiple alternative iterations of the exhibition with the volume of material they looked through in the process of putting Black Photojournalism together.

“Charlene and I probably saw 10,000 photographs researching this exhibition,” recalls Leers. “We spent the better part of five years going to different cities around the country, looking at archives. It's the first one in the museum to address this material, but hopefully many more shows will follow. We could have done it four times over in different ways.”

As the work of a photojournalist is fundamentally bound in storytelling, the guiding principle of the exhibition is about unearthing the stories embedded in four decades of American photojournalism. “One of the main goals, and actually the most important aspect, is showing images that were not necessarily shown even in the Black press, but definitely traditional press,” explains Foggie-Barnett, gesturing to the walls of the gallery.

“You’ll see a lot of iconic people like Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks, but in a setting that has not been widely used. Because in this country and all over the world, our story as we know it is as Black Americans, has been slavery, the Reformation period, the Jim Crow era, the civil rights era, which included Black nationalism, eventually, then the Obama period, and Black Lives Matter. Whatever’s going on now, we aren’t really sure, but those are the things that we have all been plugged into and repeatedly fed information on. Beyond that, and in between that, are a lot of other stories.”

Arranged chronologically, we move through the space, taking in the procession of imagery. While the overarching story of the exhibition is four decades of Black sociopolitical history in the US, thousands of other, more personal, private stories and moments are impregnated within the many images. There’s Moneta Sleet Jr.’s portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. en route to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. In this picture, he’s prone and sleeping with a blanket pulled over him in a train carriage. Just four years later, the same photographer took a portrait of King’s widow, Coretta Scott King and his daughter Bernice, at his funeral – a moment of private grief in public. There’s Anthony Barboza’s striking image of a prisoner on Death Row in Texas – it’s a close-up of the man’s face and we can’t avoid his penetrating gaze as he seemingly looks out at us through a chainlink fence.

There are striking pictures of civil rights protests from the late 60s and early 70s, and the signs of segregation are everywhere – explicitly in the forms of signage and implicitly in the form of chainlink fences separating designated “white” areas. But there’s levity too, and incredible style. Kwame Brathwaite’s indelible portrait of Grace Jones is truly iconic, while Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s picture of a bride – Josette in Queens, New York, 1981 – beaming and radiant in her white dress, is a moment of pure joy encapsulated in a gelatin print.

Elsewhere, unidentified photographers have captured the looks of the day at the Ebony Fashion Fair as American Airlines stewardess Jacquelyn Neely models a striped dress designed by Jean-Marie Armand. And a more risque photograph of Black Las Vegas showgirls brings our conversation to Sin City’s own story in the country’s civil rights movement. “We tend to only associate certain places with civil rights; people don’t really think of Las Vegas as a focus. But during the 30s, 40s and 50s and beyond, Black performers weren’t permitted to stay in the venues they played in. And so there was a lot happening there.”

A key artist here in Pittsburgh, and a crucial component of the exhibition, is Charles “Teenie” Harris (2 July 1908 – 12 June 1998), an everpresent local photographer who dedicated his practice to chronicling the lives of Pittsburgh’s residents, taking portraits of everyday life, parties, christenings, couples, families, youth culture, everything and everyone in his neighbourhood and beyond. “Harris wasn’t just a great photographer; he had a dedication to this community, and a commitment, knowledge and intimacy with it that I think emblematises a lot of the work in this show. He lived, worked and photographed in Pittsburgh for 40 years, almost exclusively in the Hill District, although he went all over the city. I mean, Charlene can talk about it because her family knew him and the stories she has are incredible…”

For Charlene Foggie-Barnett, as the Museum’s Charles “Teenie” Harris Community Archivist, Harris’ portraits have played a vital role not just in the exhibition but in the life of the city itself. Like many of Pittsburgh’s residents, the museum’s archive has become the custodian of her collection of family photographs taken by Harris over the years, now preserved in the Charles “Teenie” Harris archive for visitors and locals alike.

“The museum has all my childhood photos by Harris, my parents’ wedding, you know, all the pictures he took of my life from being three months old until my 20s are in the archives. And others do too,” she explains. “So it’s important that I can inform about not just his work, but his actual presence, who he was to the community, what he represented for us, the way he did things.” As part of her role, Foggie-Barnett works with the local community to help identify individuals from the 75,000 to 78,000 pictures in the archive, thereby excavating – and preserving – more history that might otherwise have been lost.

It’s impossible to compose a neat summation of the scope and breadth of humanity and many stories and lives represented on these walls. One overriding feeling is the astounding way in which private, intimate moments captured on film can become communal memories. Brought together, each photograph is a vital fragment of an important story that must be immortalised and retold. Hopefully, under the excellent curatorship of Dan Leers and Charlene Foggie-Barnett, this is the first of many iterations of the exhibition to be presented by Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Modern Art.

Black Photojournalism runs at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art until 19 January 2026.