This Pitt grad student is creating a historical map of the Hill District, one photo at a time

Armed with her grandfather's 35 mm camera, Kale Serrato Doyen set out to chronicle Latino spaces in her hometown of Saginaw, Michigan, where people like the third-generation Mexican American's family members are relegated to live and work. Throughout 2021, she captured the General Motors Grey Iron factory that formerly employed her grandfather and great-grandfather, derelict buildings where industry once thrived and intimate scenes in her family's home.

"Through my landscape photographs, I was able to visualize what the Latino geography of Saginaw looked like. What are the spaces we do or don't get to occupy?" said Doyen, then a Hot Metal Bridge post-baccalaureate fellow enrolled at Pitt but learning remotely from Michigan due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now a history of art and architecture doctoral student in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, her experience documenting Saginaw is shaping her approach to her PhD dissertation. Doyen's goal is to recover and create a record of Black geographies and architecture in Pittsburgh using the photos of Teenie Harris.

Charles "Teenie" Harris, a prolific photojournalist of African American life for renowned Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier from the 1930s to 1980s, left a collection of more than 80,000 images taken over the course of his career. The Carnegie Museum of Art, a short walk from the University's Pittsburgh campus, is the steward of his archive.

"Teenie is primarily remembered as a photojournalist, but I want to introduce to people how he saw the landscape," Doyen said.

Supported by a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, she is collaborating with Hill District residents, Harris' children and local historical groups, including the Pittsburgh branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, to shape the appearance and the contents of a digital map that contextualizes the location and historical impact of the photographer's work.

Doyen is in the early stages of her dissertation work, currently learning to write digital code. The map could take many forms, perhaps having the appearance of a Google Street View map that shows users how the Hill used to look by integrating Harris' photos, she said.

She noted that solidarity is a lens that informs her research questions and challenges her to examine the intersections between her lived experience and the communities connected to Harris' photos.

"If I was marginalized by space while living in Saginaw, Michigan, how are other people of color similarly marginalized?" Doyen said.