Alex Harris, Professor of the Practice of Public Policy, Hart Leadership Program  

Office Location: Center for Documentary Studies, 1317 W Pettigrew St
Email Address: aharris@duke.edu
Web Page:http://alex-harris.com/

Areas of Expertise

  • International, Human Rights
  • Media and Communications, Documentary Photography or Film
  • Social Policy, Demography

Education:
Psychology, Yale University, 1971
Phillips Andover Academy, 1968

Research Categories: Documentary Photography, Home Foreclosure, Aging in America

Research Description: Research: Documentary photography; media coverage of humanitarian challenges; aging and retirement in the United States; Hispanic Southwestern United States; Cuba; The Foreclosure Crisis

Teaching (Fall 2009):

  • docst 49s.01, First year seminar Synopsis
    Bridges 113, M 10:05 AM-12:35 PM
  • Pubpol 49s.01, First-year seminar (top) Synopsis
    Bridges 113, M 10:05 AM-12:35 PM
  • Docst 178s.01, Color photography Synopsis
    Smith 228, M 07:15 PM-09:45 PM
  • Docst 180s.01, The photographic essay Synopsis
    Smith 228, M 01:15 PM-03:45 PM
  • Docst 196s.01, Capstone seminar
    See instru, F 07:30 PM-10:00 PM

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

  1. with A. Harris and W. Bamberger. "Behind the Scenes on the Set of CHE." Time.com (December 12, 2008). (frontpage of Time Website on December 12 and 13, 2008, then ongoing access to story.) [html]
  2. Hans Durer. "Photographing Cuba." Across Cultures (October 5, 2008). a review of The Idea of Cuba [html]
  3. with A. Harris and W. deBuys. "Sunset Canto from River of Traps." Terrain.org (Summer, 2008). [htm]
  4. A. Harris. "Backstory." Popular Photography (May, 2008).
  5. A. Harris. "PDN Photo Annual 2008." Photo District News (May, 2008).

Bio/Profile
Alex Harris is a Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Studies at Duke, and the founder (in 1980) of the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke, which he directed for eight years.

He attended Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University. After graduation from Yale in 1971, he photographed substandard housing and living conditions in North Carolina as part of a research project at the new Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs at Duke. In 1972 he began a collaboration with Dr. Robert Coles that would result in six years of photographic work in New Mexico and Alaska and in the publication of two books with Coles: The Old Ones of New Mexico (1973, UNM Press), and The Last and First Eskimos, (1978, New York Graphic Society).

During these years, while continuing to live and photograph in northern New Mexico villages, Harris began to commute to North Carolina to teach documentary photography at Duke University. In 1980 he founded the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke. Subsequently he became a founding member of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. At the Center for Documentary Studies Harris is the creative director of the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program.

River of Traps (1990, UNM Press), his book with writer William DeBuys, was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. His next, Red, White, Blue and God Bless You, was published in 1992 by UNM Press in association with a national traveling exhibition that opened at the International Center of Photography in New York City in 1994. A selection of Harris's photographs was published in 1998 in Old and On Their Own (W.W. Norton) with text by Robert Coles and additional photographs by Thomas Roma. His book, Islas en El Tiempo, Islands in Time) was published by the Valencian Museum of Modern Art in Spain in 2000. His new book, The Idea of Cuba, focuses on the "special period" in contemporary Cuban history and will be co-published by the Center for Documentary Studies and the University of New Mexico Press in the spring of 2007.

In 1995 With Robert Coles, Harris launched a new national magazine "Double Take," and worked with Coles as co-editor through March of 1998. As an editor, Harris has published: Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness (UNC Press 1982) with Margaret Sartor, A World Unsuspected: Portraits of Southern Childhood (1985 UNC Press), In The Streets by Helen Levitt (1988 Duke University Press), Beyond the Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa (Aperture 1989), A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South (Norton 1996), Arrivals and Departures (with Lee Friedlander) (DAP 2004), and Together We Do Good Work: SEWA's Child-Care Program in Gujarat India, by Sara Gomez (CDS 2005).

Harris's photographs have been exhibited (Since 2004) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The International Center of Photography in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Georgia, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Harris's photographs are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Addison Gallery of Contemporary Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and North Carolina Museum of Art. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, a N.C. Visual Artist Fellowship from the NEA, and a Lyndhurst Award. Harris is married to Margaret Sartor and they have a son and a daughter.

Alex Harris