Photographer Chester Higgins has spent more than six decades creating images that honor the presence, history, and achievements of people of African descent. Raised in rural southern Alabama during the height of the Civil Rights movement, he discovered photography as a student at Tuskegee University, a path that would eventually lead to a nearly forty-year career as a photographer for The New York Times. Chester Higgins: Shared Memories, an exhibition spanning six decades of his work, is on view at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York through June 20, 2026. We spoke with him about what it means to respect your subject and tell their story in a way that is ‘unique, embracing, and nonjudgmental.’
During your time at The New York Times, your work contributed to changes in how Black Americans were represented. What are some ways in which you helped bring about change that others could learn from?
“The reason that I became a publishing photographer was because I wanted to change the visual diet from exclusive negativity when the subject is my people to include a more balanced human personality. I’d like to think that my daily visual representation of my people broadened the way they were perceived.
“I tried to look at poverty differently, without the lens of class, pity, or exclusion. In all of my images, regardless of their economic and social situation, I try to focus on something much larger, like their humanity.
“We, humans, have simple desires; we all want to be happy. But since we humans can be complicated and defective by nature, the road from where we start and where we end up, for some, can be an exhaustive struggle. But even in our struggles and differences, we are blessed that our common denominator is a creator who is generous to all of us. Regardless of who we are, we are all afforded air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, and emotions to season our life experience. I worked to highlight universal experiences such as celebrations, ceremonies, families, struggles, enjoyment, and aging.’
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“It’s beautiful escapism. There are times where you just need to kind of let go and be somewhere else, and I find that if I’m in a tense moment or anything like that, I just look at my photographs and it’s kind of like I’m transported. It’s always done that for me.” —photography collector Alessandro Uzielli on his collection of over 600 photographs
“Purgatory, Paradise examines civic and commercial architecture across the American landscape—corporate centers, museums, strip malls, municipal buildings—photographed in moments of stillness. Stripped of activity, these buildings lose their specific functions and begin to resemble one another: clean facades, flat planes, sun-bleached surfaces. Institutions shift toward abstraction, and structures once built to signal progress and permanence now appear suspended between promise and uncertainty.” —Sinziana Velicescu, photographer
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