If one thing embodies all the images that photographer Chester Higgins, Jr. has taken, from his portraits of kings and political leaders to musicians and visual artists, it is dignity. In a world filled with negative visual depictions of people of color, what comes across in his decades of visual art is the love he has for Black people, a love he wishes they had for themselves as well.
“I want[ed] to change the visual image... redefine the visual image of Black people in the media,” Higgins, 77, said about his motivation to become a photographer when he moved from his birthplace of New Brockton, then a hamlet of 800 souls in southeastern Alabama, to New York in 1969 to learn the craft. It was that negative image of Black and brown folks, which dominated (and some say still does) the media, that pushed Higgins to become a photographer. That same drive led him to the New York Times, where he spent 40 years as one of its most celebrated portraitists and photojournalists.
