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Chester Higgins

Biography Intro

Photographer and author Chester Higgins was born in Alabama in 1946, and was formally educated at Tuskegee University, graduating in 1970.  Experiences with his family’s church community, as well as with college campus student protest, were formative in developing the direction Higgins’s artistic practice.  Higgins’s oeuvre portrays the dignity of the African American and African diasporic communities, and this work has brought Higgins all over the world, and to Africa in particular, many times.  Higgins worked as a staff photographer for The New York Times from 1975 until 2014, and is the author of several publications, including Black Woman (1970); Drums of Life (1974); Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa (1994); Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging (2000); and Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer’s Journey (2004).  Higgins’s work has been the subject of many international exhibitions, and is held in notable collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art.  Higgins lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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