Chester Higgins Jr.
*The birth of Chester Higgins Jr. is celebrated on this date in 1946. He is a Black photographer. Higgins was born in Fairhope, Alabama, and grew up in New Brockton, Alabama. He attended Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where he met the school's official photographer, Prentice H. Polk. He graduated in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in business management.
Higgins worked as a photographer for The New York Times from 1975 until 2014 and exhibited in museums worldwide. Much of his work features the life and culture of people of African descent. His photographs have appeared in magazines including Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Ebony, Essence, and Black Enterprise. Higgins has also published several collections of his photography, among them Black Woman (1970), Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa (1994), Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging (2000), and Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer's Journey (2004).
His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has been included in numerous book collections and appeared in publications such as Newsweek, Fortune, Look, Essence, and Life.
In Sacred Nile, Higgins narrates the story of the African beginnings of spirituality, antecedents of the Biblical world along the river Nile from the 6,000-foot-high mountains of Kush (modern-day Ethiopia) through Nubia (Sudan) down to the ancient land of Kemet (Egypt). Higgins is represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York City.
