Overview:
The new exhibition chronicles how Black photographers, including those in Pittsburgh, shaped the media landscape.
In 1949, a Florida woman named Sara Lee Creech watched two Black girls in her town cradle white baby dolls. The scene unsettled her. Creech set out to create a toy that could carry a different message: a Black-skinned baby with soft features and a neatly pressed dress. The Ideal Toy Company manufactured the doll, which hit store shelves in 1951, one of the first mass-produced Black dolls made with dignity rather than caricature. But they didn’t sell well, and it would be nearly two decades before another toy giant, Mattel, introduced Barbie’s Black friend Christie in 1968.
The short life of Creech’s doll revealed how something as small as a child’s toy could spark a fight over representation, and how slow mainstream culture was to embrace it. That same fight for visibility played out daily on newspaper presses from Pittsburgh to Chicago, where Black photographers documented joy, struggle, and everyday life for readers who rarely saw themselves elsewhere. Photographers for the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Atlanta Daily World, and Ebony wielded cameras with urgency: to make Black life visible, to record both resistance and celebration, and to push back against a mainstream media that often ignored or distorted their communities.
That labor comes into focus this fall at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Black Photojournalism, which opened Sept. 13 in the Heinz Galleries and runs through Jan. 19, 2026, is a landmark exhibition that brings those photographs into the spotlight. Spanning from the end of World War II through the 1984 presidential campaigns, the show gathers the work of nearly 60 photographers who documented the Civil Rights Movement, cultural transformation, and daily life across the United States.
One of the images on view, taken by an unidentified photographer, shows Creech on the set of the Kathi Norris Show in 1952, her dolls propped carefully on the table as cameras roll and studio lights glare overhead.
“The exhibition starts in the 1940s, because white-owned publications refused to work with Black writers or photojournalists, and their coverage of Black communities therefore bears the bias they held,” Dan Leers, the museum’s curator of photography tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “Most focused exclusively on negative stories, such as crime, drug use, and violence.”
Against that backdrop, Black-owned and -staffed magazines and newspapers flourished, from the launch of Ebony in 1945 to the Courier’s record circulation of 357,000 in 1947. Together, they built networks and editorial strategies that foregrounded Black life for Black readers.
The exhibition’s chosen window, 1945 to 1984, covers seismic shifts in American history. Soldiers returned from war to a segregated nation. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s demanded change in the streets and the courts. By the 1980s, Jesse Jackson’s presidential bids signaled a new era of political possibility. Leers notes that this optimism emerged even as Reagan-era policies and the crack epidemic fueled incarceration and reinforced damaging stereotypes. “This section of the exhibition pictures the realities of systematic disenfranchisement of Black people during the decade, while also commemorating and uplifting individuals and moments of celebration that appeared almost exclusively on the pages of Black-owned newspapers,” he explains.
The curators, Leers and Charlene Foggie-Barnett, and the museum’s Charles “Teenie” Harris community archivist, resist reducing the story to protest alone. “Many photographs of civil rights demonstrations and activists have become icons of American culture: think of protestors getting sprayed with fire hoses or attacked by police dogs,” Leers says. “Nearly all these photographs were made by white photographers for white-owned publications, exemplifying how depictions of Black people in the press at the time centered on violence and criminality.”
Alongside these familiar images, the exhibition features photographs of neighborhood beauty queens, choirs in pressed robes, Little League games, and children leaping through the spray of a hydrant. These quieter scenes insist that everyday life was as newsworthy as public struggle, a reminder that joy itself could be a form of resistance — a fullness of life that rarely appeared in white-owned newspapers.
For local audiences, the exhibition feels especially resonant. The Courier, once a leading Black newspaper, anchors the story. Its Washington Bureau archive is among the many collections featured in Black Photojournalism alongside materials from Howard University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Central to the show is Charles “Teenie” Harris, whose archive — more than 70,000 images preserved by the Carnegie Museum of Art — documents life in Pittsburgh’s Hill District from the 1930s through the 1970s.
“Black Photojournalism helps describe the constellation of Black journalists, photographers, and publishers of which Harris was a key part,” Leers says.
Foggie-Barnett sees Harris’s work reframed in dialogue with his peers nationwide. “The shared community connection that all these Black photographers had was one of the most important aspects of their careers,” she tells City Paper. “That advantage allowed them to move freely in situations to capture more truthful moments.”
She also points to stories that surface across the archives, like the five generations of women who sustained the Baltimore Afro-American, now preserved by Savannah Wood, who is building a new facility to house millions of photographs. Or the images of the Moulin Rouge in Las Vegas, where Black entertainers headlined casinos but were forced to sleep in barracks and cabins because the hotels they performed in remained closed to them.
The exhibition design by artist David Hartt clusters photographs as conversations rather than isolated works. A shot of King arriving at an airport might be paired with children at play, echoing how the Black press placed front-page politics beside neighborhood pride. Leers credits Hartt with shaping nearly every element of the installation — from furniture and lighting to large-scale photographic enlargements — creating what he calls a thoughtful and immersive environment for visitors. The show also emphasizes materiality: original prints marked with grease pencils, crop lines, and typed captions remind visitors that these were working documents, not gallery art.
As a community archivist, Foggie-Barnett says her own lived experience informs her selections. “I know Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris’ story, his practices, and the pitfalls he survived, like not being paid for film, flash bulbs, or photo chemicals, but only for the finished product — a beautiful photo print,” she explains. “These issues have been echoed in the conversations I’ve had with surviving photographers and archivists.” For her, the show highlights the motivation, proximity, and trust required to capture these images in the first place.
One photograph resonates especially strongly for her: Harris’ image of a segregated Pittsburgh pool, shot from outside the fence with the barrier visible in the frame. “As if to say, ‘I can’t get in here — see the barrier?’” she says. When the pool was finally desegregated, it was immediately closed, its pipes declared broken.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 400-page catalog edited by Leers and Foggie-Barnett, presenting work by 57 photographers and about 200 photographs (some of which are not displayed in the gallery), with contributions from scholars like Joy Bivins, Tina M. Campt, and Gerald Horne. The catalog allows the images and stories to reach audiences beyond the closing of the show in January 2026.
“The content in Black Photojournalism serves as proof of the real history of Blacks in these eras in America,” Foggie-Barnett says. “It was almost seamless from Pittsburgh to New York, to Dallas, to Los Angeles, to Atlanta, to Washington state, and Washington, D.C. These brave men and women have captured our proof for posterity. It’s up to visitors to utilize the images and tell the stories they reveal.”
Just as Sara Lee Creech believed a doll could shape how a child saw themselves, these photographs shaped how Black communities — and ultimately the nation — understood their own history. This fall, their stories move from newsroom archives to museum walls, asking us to see them anew.
INFOBOX: Black Photojournalism. Continues through Jan. 19, 2026. Carnegie Museum of Art. 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Included with regular admission. carnegieart.org
This article appears in Sept. 24-30 2025.
