Shared Memories — As staff photographer for The New York Times, Chester Higgins captured Black culture and spiritual connection like no other. A new exhibition celebrates his life and impact.
Standing at the cusp of his 80th birthday, Chester Higgins Jr. is a monumental force in photography that began with a call to spirit. Hailing from Fairhope, Alabama, Higgins came of age during the final decades of segregation in the American South. His grandparents lived with the family after their home was burned by the Ku Klux Klan after his grandfather, a minister, paid poll taxes so members of the community could vote.
One night, nine-year-old Higgins witnessed an apparition; his grandfather recognised it as a call to Scripture, and the young boy intuitively understood, securing his minister license in September 1957, shortly before his tenth birthday. He became attuned to the presence of a world of Spirit existing parallel to our own after a near-death experience. “I saw the world I was leaving and a world I didn’t know; it was a whole other Cosmos,” Higgins says. “I tried to parse it out by looking at the contours of the most extreme behaviour about life. I’ve come to understand that Spirit is in charge of everything and that it all exists at the pleasure of Spirit.”
Whether making a pilgrimage to the banks of Egypt’s Lake Nasser to dance in honour of ancient spirits or gathering for a Vodoum purification ceremony in Gonaives, Haiti, Higgins follows the call of Spirit from the continent across the diaspora, tracing roots to the fruits in the tree of life to create a luminous portrait of Black life over six decades. Now Higgins brings together more than 40 works made around the globe, from the streets of Harlem to mountains of Ethiopia with the exhibition, Shared Memories, at Bruce Silverstein in New York through June 20.
