"His shots of everyday people are amazing. People seem to kind of jump off the page," said Stanley Nelson, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and MacArthur "genius grant" winner who has made a number of acclaimed films on African American artists, business people, and workers.
"They don't have the sense of somebody kind of looking in and spying on the community. For me his pictures are very unique," Nelson said.
Harris was a gifted basketball player as a young man, and helped start a Negro League baseball team. His brother was Pittsburgh's biggest bookie, and that gave him access to people throughout the city.
But he found his mission at the Pittsburgh Courier, which was distributed all over the country via a network of Pullman train porters. Through the paper, from the late 1930s through the 1970s, Harris had endless opportunities to chronicle daily life and to meet the rich, famous, and powerful.
Harris photographed Richard M. Nixon, Jackie Robinson, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and many musical greats, such as Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington.
"That was the black national paper of record at the time," said Laurence Glasco, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh.
Many people stopped by the Courier offices because of its clout with African Americans, Glasco said. Yet Harris neither pandered to nor looked down on celebrities, he added.
"He really didn't have a cult of celebrity. He wouldn't cross a street to shake a celebrity's hand. He was interested in them, but he really saw them as just people. And that really comes out in his photographs," Glasco said.
A young Muhammad Ali, for example, is shown picking up his mother and holding her in his arms.
