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“Through my landscape photographs, I was able to visualize what the Latino geography of Saginaw looked like. What are the spaces we do or don’t get to occupy?” said Doyen, then a Hot Metal Bridge post-baccalaureate fellow enrolled at Pitt but learning remotely from Michigan due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now a history of art and architecture doctoral student in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, her experience documenting Saginaw is shaping her approach to her PhD dissertation. Doyen’s goal is to recover and create a record of Black geographies and architecture in Pittsburgh using the photos of Teenie Harris.
Charles “Teenie” Harris, a prolific photojournalist of African American life for renowned Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier from the 1930s to 1980s, left a collection of more than 80,000 images taken over the course of his career. The Carnegie Museum of Art, a short walk from the University’s Pittsburgh campus, is the steward of his archive.
“Teenie is primarily remembered as a photojournalist, but I want to introduce to people how he saw the landscape,” Doyen said.
Supported by a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, she is collaborating with Hill District residents, Harris’ children and local historical groups, including the Pittsburgh branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, to shape the appearance and the contents of a digital map that contextualizes the location and historical impact of the photographer’s work.
Doyen is in the early stages of her dissertation work, currently learning to write digital code. The map could take many forms, perhaps having the appearance of a Google Street View map that shows users how the Hill used to look by integrating Harris’ photos, she said.
She noted that solidarity is a lens that informs her research questions and challenges her to examine the intersections between her lived experience and the communities connected to Harris’ photos.
“If I was marginalized by space while living in Saginaw, Michigan, how are other people of color similarly marginalized?” Doyen said.
Her grandfather spoke of the racialized space of the factory floor during his time at the General Motors plant. “He noticed that people of color had poorer working conditions and less job mobility than white workers, and often Black workers would be exposed to even worse working conditions than the Mexicans would,” Doyen said.
But she also draws broader parallels between Saginaw and Pittsburgh.
“There is some beautiful architecture in both cities, but also many buildings falling apart or being demolished. I see the same problems of decades of disinvestment, too,” Doyen said. “Even though there has been economic comeback since the decline of the automotive and steel industries, you still have neighborhoods like the Hill District, where there’s no consistent development.
“These problems always disproportionately affect people of color. For Mexican American communities in Saginaw and Black communities in Pittsburgh, patterns of disrepair and disinvestment are causing our historical neighborhoods and built environments to disappear,” added Doyen.
The African American people connected to the communities Harris photographed are at the heart of the project, Doyen said, emphasizing that her dissertation is rooted in collaboration and that she is determined to make her work accessible to both academic and nonacademic audiences.
“When I write, I think about my own family because these ideas apply to them. Although I am the first in my family to attend college, I am studying the historical context of the political and economic problems that have shaped our lives and environments,” she said.
Photography by Kale Serrato Doyen