Chester Higgins American , b. 1946

Chester Higgins (b. 1946) has photographed the people of the African diaspora for nearly six decades, bringing fine-art photography and photojournalism together in work shaped by memory, spirituality and the dignity of everyday life. Alongside four decades on the staff of The New York Times, he has pursued a sustained investigation of Black life in America, Africa and the Caribbean, photographing not spectacle or crisis but families at home, individuals in contemplation and communities gathered in shared purpose.

Higgins was born in Fairhope, Alabama, and raised in New Brockton. While studying business at Tuskegee, he walked into P. H. Polk’s studio in 1967 to collect a print and left with a mentor—the man who, in Higgins’s words, placed the first camera in his hands. In 1968, dismayed by the local media’s caricature of civil rights protesters, he borrowed a camera and began photographing his own community. His first publication appeared that year, and after receiving his degree in 1970, he moved to New York, where Gordon Parks, Cornell Capa and Romare Bearden became mentors and friends. Bearden guided him in art from 1972 to 1980.

Black Woman appeared in 1970 and Drums of Life in 1974, and both exhibitions travelled through Europe, Africa and Latin America during the decade under the auspices of the United States State Department. Higgins joined The New York Times in 1975 as its first Black staff photographer, making the cover within his first year with Fashionable Teens, Harlem, and remained there until 2014. He used his assignments and travels to build the projects that became his books: Feeling the Spirit travelled from the International Center of Photography to the Smithsonian; Elder Grace was developed over five years; and Sacred Nile followed African spirituality up the Nile to its Biblical antecedents.

By the time Higgins reached Senegal in 1971, his sense of Black history had already been formed by the American South and the awakenings of the 1960s. Africa did not introduce him to identity but expanded his understanding of it. He has since travelled to Africa some fifty times. The Door of No Return, made on Gorée Island in 1972, confronts the threshold through which millions were forced into slavery without turning the history into spectacle. Higgins has been exclusively represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery since 2021, beginning with The Indelible Spirit, followed by Black Pantheon in 2023 and Shared Memories in 2026. Recent exhibitions include Flight into Egypt at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Photography and the Black Arts Movement at the National Gallery of Art and the Getty.

Higgins’s work is the subject of two PBS films, An American Photographer: Chester Higgins Jr. and Brotherman, and his weekly New York Times column, Lens, ran through the 1990s and 2000s. He was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in 2022 and has received the Gordon Parks Legend Award, as well as grants from the Ford Foundation, the NEA and the Rockefeller Foundation. Wrestling with questions of memory, place and identity, Higgins has said, “I see my life as a narrative and my photography as its expression.” Lonnie Bunch has described Higgins as an artist who elevated photography from documentary to fine art.