My name is Charlene Foggie- Barnett and I am very honored to be the Charles Teenie Harris Community Archivist for his photographic archive at Carnegie Museum of Art.

Tell us about your work.

It's a big title, but tell us really what that encompasses.

Well, this has been a beautiful and very fortuitous journey for me.

It encompasses working with the community.

It encompasses being a liaison of the community with the museum pertaining to the archive.

And I fell into this opportunity as a volunteer in 2006, and I was identifying my own photos that Charles Teenie Harris took of me and my family.

And at the time, the museum had just acquired Teenies archive.

And so the only problem was that nothing was identified really.

It's not something that Teenie expected to do to to be hanging in the walls of a museum or being utilized for things that needed strategic and, you know, very specific titles.

So the museum had found that they were starting from scratch, from negative number one, to put any information of the who, what, where, when and why they could see in the photo.

They had begun interviewing people that they could say, oh, I think that's so-and-so, and asked them to come in and give oral histories and tell us about the photos.

I was one of those people.

And as my four years of volunteering went on, the museum found that some people wouldn't speak to strangers, but they would speak to me about what they were doing in the photos.

I've gone from oral history coordinator to an archive assistant, and now I'm the community archivist.

So all that origin story about how you were in the photographs, your family was in the photographs, and then being that volunteer that came in and actually identified and then said, like, that's me.

How did that feel to suddenly see this person who you'd known all your life to be the person who took pictures of everyone in the neighborhood, from the neighborhoods to businesses to people to civil rights leaders.

Suddenly he was being lifted up in that way that you probably always thought that he should have been.

That's always an interesting question to, to wrap my head around, because yes and no, it's kind of like Teenie was someone I saw weekly several times a week as a child.

And so it was just kind of interesting that now I'm an adult woman who's moved back to Pittsburgh, and here Teenie has collected, you know, nearly 80,000 individual images.

And I was so impressed.

But then I realized, this is a catalog.

This is a historic information that is so immeasurably important.

And the process of trying to go from the everyday guy that I saw that I really loved and admired and enjoyed being around to now he's being lifted up for his work, for who he was, for his practice, and now I felt very responsible in a lot of ways to thank Teenie not only for my own photos, but for everyone's.

- You know, that makes a lot of sense because you've been able to answer a lot of questions, like through that process, that oral history process of having people literally come into your home and to come into the museum and say, who was that, what was happening, what was going on?

And I think that was such an amazing way to connect with the community and to find out the story behind an image.

I'm curious about you and your office and being there, where the gallery is seeing those faces all the time and knowing the stories that goes with them.

Do you feel like you're close to those people?

Yeah, you're going to make me well up.

I started welling up.

I do.

When I turn the lights off to my office and leaves, I always say, good night, Teenie, and I feel like I'm leaving my parents and my friends and people I admired that I grew up knowing I leave them.

I've spent all day with them, and some days I want to stay there all the rest of the day and just kind of in a way say, oh, I found out this about your history, or I just found this article connected to you or whatever it's.

And other times I'm like very sad because I, I miss them, but the, the thing I think is most rewarding for me is to be able to actually kind of assist in an Alma Speed Fox story, obviously my own father, but people like K. Leroy Irvis and all these attorneys and judges who are around me and Judge Brown and and Byrd Brown and his mother, Wilhelmina, you know, Billy Brown, it's just it it's like these people were just such an everyday part of me.

And now I'm dealing every day with them.

And I think that's my favorite thing to share, is that Teenie is the proof of our community as the black community in general in this country, but also the black community, specifically in Pittsburgh, PA, and the dignity with which we conducted ourselves and how we continued despite the adversity we faced.

I can't even tell you how much I esteem I hold that collection in and what you mean from the first time I saw those images.

But the other thing is, like you said, it's a road map.

Because those people, those giants that you and I grew up with and around their disappearing.

Reverend Patrick is gone, and Alma Speed Fox is gone and Byrd Brown is gone.

And Reverend Jimmie Joe Robinson is gone.

And all these folks that were just part of the conversations in the background, I mean, I found my NAACP junior membership badge when I was six, and it's like someone came to our neighborhood in Wilkinsburg and signed us all up for that.

And those are like little testaments to the work that those people did, and for you to have actually lived through that and to be able to turn to those photographs and see what it meant to see the humanity of us and what we were striving for and what we accomplished.

So along that road, you also worked on this black photojournalism book, which can I tell you how heavy this is?

Yes, I know it's it's very heavy.

I like I took it out of the house this morning.

I'm like, holy moly.

But it's an amazing tribute.

It's a beautiful tribute.

It's thoughtful.

And the photographs.

Through the stories behind those stories behind the people who made these things happen.

And you are the coauthor of this book.

So tell me about that work.

Like, how did you figure, like, I need to tell the stories of not just Teenie, but his contemporaries as well.

This was a beautiful example of a great collaboration between myself and the curator of photography at Carnegie Museum of Art, Dan Leers.

Dan became the manager of the archive in 2000, and in working with me very closely and discussing what Teenies practices were about and how he got all of this, you know, I mean, everything you can think of is in this collection.

But the question came up for both of us.

Well, are there others out there?

Are there other Teenies?

And we know there are other black photographers, wonderful photographers like James Van der Zee and Gordon Parks, different types of photographers in that light.

But what about the press photographers and the photojournalists out there?

And so this was something Dan invited me to do with him.

I'm so honored that he did.

And we went about going around the country to find the same kind of content to scour records that may be in Library of Congress or maybe in someone's basement.

You contrast that with a Josephine Baker who doesn't look like the Josephine Baker we're so familiar with, you know, the the dancer.

And I'm seeing her at the Washington Monument with a slew of medals on her chest.

As someone who was working in her way with the French Resistance.

And the photo was unidentified.

So I just was drawn to this woman who's wearing medals at the March on Washington.

And lo and behold, we discover it's Josephine Baker.

Those were the most rewarding and the most head spinning moments to see those things and to learn that these are buried in people's basements or in collections that are just tucked away and no one has been able to take get the finances, maybe, or take the opportunity to sift through them and organize them, as we have with Teenie.

And I mean, it took us over five years to do the research and it was so well worth it.

Yeah, we were traveling.

We were meeting with other with photographers, other archivists and curators.

And I think a really rewarding thing for me was learning that people that are even in big collection work, like at the Library of Congress, they know their collections and they they love them and they embrace them and they they feel like how I feel about Teenie.

They're like, no, you have to see this or you have to explore that.

- Again, it goes back to the bearing witness.

Those people in the cities that are far away from Pittsburgh, have they bear witness to a time when that kind of work was so valued and so needed.

Not that it isnt now, but newspapers were the way into people's homes and publication.

Yeah.

And where has this been?

Where has it been stored?

And thank goodness it survived degradation over age.

The conditions they were kept in, which were not, you know, necessarily the greatest conditions because no one was expecting perhaps, that this would be something that needed to be preserved for a museum level exhibition.

Photojournalism is difficult just as a practice.

But when you have to manipulate, you know your your imagery to make it look like something.

With each and every one of these photos at in that day, you know, especially in the 40s in the through the, the 1990s, it's it's almost impossible to fathom how they got these things out on assignment so quickly.

I want to read you something.

Okay.

This is from the book.

You said my understanding has grown and therefore my admiration and appreciation for the content are even deeper than when I began.

Thank you.

I appreciate you finding that.

I, I do feel a great responsibility to represent within a museum context something like this.

It's it's something not new to people, people of color who work in museums.

But it's becoming more and more prevalent, and it's very different than, say, contemporary art or, you know, a more abstract platform for or medium for art in that it's it goes directly drawn to certain lines.

It's beautiful.

That's why Teenie chose it to be in the museum, because it's an artistic collection, but it's also very much history driven.

But the thing is that everyone that we've ever interviewed always saying, no matter what he was doing, Teenie always had that camera with him.

And I can attest to that.

That big speed graphic camera came, was on our coffee table or at the church or at the fashion shows on the boat, and maybe he'd gone for an assignment, but even if he just was driving around.

Some of the the most beautiful and I guess for lack of a better term, purely artistic content is things that he liked, like water running down the street or pictures of children playing, or dogs and cats.

He loved animals.

I also spent a lot of time making certain that we don't, in our effort to use the images, or for other production companies, film companies, authors, educators, actors, playwrights.

We want them to use the images to construct what their work is about, but I want to make sure that they are doing it with the dignity with which Teenie took them.

Right.

And the trust.

It's great to have it as a reference and, you know, as a back story, but you want to make sure that it's not being exploitative and that it's respectful of the people and the time and his work.

Exactly.

What were your aspirations as a younger Charlene, and did you ever imagine yourself here now being the woman that you are?

My aspirations were to beat it out of Pittsburgh.

I my brother is 60.

I my my brother is 16 years older than I am and living.

He had moved to Los Angeles when I was two years old, and so I was spending summers with him since I was three years old.

And I just loved the West Coast, and I was so steeped in all of this, I didn't, you know, it was like, okay, civil rights, you know, I get it.

You know, I'm like.

Give a girl a break.

Yeah, I. Yes.

But I and I do mean really understand all of it.

It just knew it was all happening.

So I went I wanted to be a theater arts major, so I went to study theater arts.

And my sister in law was also she was an actress in LA and had a TV show, Romper Room, LA.

And my brother was an engineer and he was a photographer.

So I started I was in school and then I was working for her as her production assistant on a television show, national television a show like Romper Room, and I'm working for him as his photographic stylist, and I'm just living my life.

I'm excited because I'm in a creative realm.

That's all I wanted to be around was creativity.

You know, 30 years later, I moved back here to take care of my parents and our my in-laws.

And now all of a sudden, all that was around me as a child is becoming more and more evident that it was groundbreaking civil rights history.

And I just didn't even understand it.

Like Leroy Irvis being one of our good friends who taught my brother how to do woodwork, and brother actually had a business and worked with Leroy through the years.

He was his mentor and actually, you know, a father figure to my brother.

But, you know, my own children were in Duquesne and they said, My God, I was reading about this guy named Leroy Irvis.

Is that the K. Leroy Irvis that Uncle Milton's always talking about?

I'm like, yeah.

And they're like, why didn't you tell us?

And I'm like, tell you what?

Put this, you know, and is this person, Reverend Patrick and these people and, you know, and they're pulling out names and it dawned on me.

Oh my God.

That's right.

These are major civil rights people.

These are major people in the world, not just Pittsburgh.

And they were all over the Hill district.

You know, Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks are in my dad's pulpit with him for the 50th anniversary of the NAACP.

And my dad was president of the NAACP locally.

And so he brought it to the biggest venue he could get, which was his church.

So those moments, you know, paired with the images that Teenie took of these very same people in settings that I'm familiar with and settings that all of us as Pittsburghers are pretty much familiar with.

Looking back and looking forward, what are work are you most proud of and what gives you hope for the future?

I'm most proud that I can represent Teenie in terms of his work, his life's work.

You know, I am able to offer a conduit of information.

The images are there.

But, you know, knowing his process, I'm most proud to say I knew this, this artist.

You know, I watched him make this.

I've seen the basement where 90% of these images were processed in a basement.

So I'm most proud of, you know, the magnitude of work that he's done.

And to be able to say, if you if you like these photos, you'll love these.

And to to make sure people get a broad view of the archive, not just the top hits.

My hope for the future is that others will carry this forward.

You know, that's why my work to me is important.

Because I'll be 70 in a year and I cannot just leave this and say, oh, well, you know, hope the photos work out great and hope people get there, you know?

And thanks a lot.

Yeah, thanks a lot.

And so I'm trying to get my information to a younger demographic and to have it be appreciated and respected and revered by that younger demographic.

And it's happening because otherwise, if we don't make it relatable to this younger group of people, it, you know, it could just kind of, you know, the ether of it could float away.

I'm very proud and very grateful to be able to work with the archive, and I'm very hopeful that I can make it something that is attractive and important to a younger demographic.

That was wonderful.

I thank you so much for saying yes to this.

I know I kind of like I tugged on your skirt a long time to get you to do this, so I really appreciate it.

I'm glad that you were the person who said like, no, you need me to do this because I was actually in the room where it happened.

So, yes.

Very.

Hamilton.

Yes.

As a theater person, I appreciate that.