https://youtu.be/1iZJk3pOhUg?feature=shared
Pitt Wire by Irv Dyer
https://www.pittwire.pitt.edu/features-articles/2025/04/10/frank-floyd-hightower-photo
Frank Floyd Hightower caught the shutterbug at an early age.
He worked in the darkroom, at weddings and on other assignments alongside his father, Frank Russell Hightower, who worked for more than 20 years as a public relations photographer for Allegheny County and as a freelancer photographing local events.
Around 1960, a teenage Hightower bought his first camera, an Ansco that used 620 roll film, with the money he made selling the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper at a stand at the end of the Sixth Street Bridge. The paper was in high demand as it was filled with news of the Pittsburgh Pirates and their journey to victory over the New York Yankees in the World Series.
Hightower became more seriously interested in photography as a student at Oliver High School, when his father passed down his own Minolta twin lens camera. The camera became an important tool for the student-athlete after he suffered an injury in the high jump and could no longer compete in track and field — Hightower stayed close to his teammates by photographing their practices and competitions, and his passion for photography grew.
Before graduating in 1963, he took scores of photographs for the yearbook, the school newspaper and even won a few awards and citations for his photography.
At Oliver, Hightower’s love of photography was nurtured by physics teacher Eugene Paseoff, who ran the Camera Club, and Frank Ross, an art teacher and ceramicist who introduced the burgeoning artist to photography as a fine art as well as a way to convey ideas, emotions and creative expression.
But as Hightower came of age in the late 1960s, he was also deeply affected by the social and political change swirling around him. The Black Arts Movement, which believed arts could educate and spread pride, was particularly influential.
Hightower befriended a group of young men who began to share their ideas. Known as the Centre Avenue Poets, a group that included Rob Penny, who eventually taught at University of Pittsburgh; and August Wilson, who became a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Hightower also began to attend the Kuntu Writers Workshop, a practicum run by Pitt’s Africana Studies department, where anyone in the community could gather for encouragement, guidance and feedback on their writing.
Through mentorship from the poets and Kuntu, Hightower began to write his own plays, once being coached by dramaturg and theater scholar Paul Carter Harrison. His writing explored African culture, and he became greatly interested in African traditional religions.
But documenting the people and everyday life of the Black community remained his highest passion. As he was out and about, his camera of choice in the early part of his career was the same Minolta twin lenses 120 roll film camera his father passed down.
As he moved about Pittsburgh, his emerging political and social consciousness gave him “a new eye in how he saw people.” After graduating from the Antonelli School of Photography in Philadelphia, Hightower began to focus on portraiture, using his photography to showcase how people represented their culture through dress, hair and style.
Every day, everywhere he went, Hightower had his camera. And he captured a vibrant, changing community: of civil rights figures, people in the crowd at arts festivals, friends. Many of those he photographed were familiar, ordinary people who became celebrated, extraordinary figures, such as Sala Udin, a Pittsburgh political leader, and Jake Milliones, a former Pittsburgh school board member.
Often, as he roamed, he found himself at the same scenes with legendary Pittsburgh Courier photographer, Charles “Teenie” Harris. He observed and learned from Harris, but Hightower always knew his own images were just as significant for their storytelling and documentation of life.
Hightower’s huge trove of images are now part of the University of Pittsburgh Library System’s (ULS) Archives and Special Collections. His work documents the Black community and Pittsburgh from the 1960s to present, including the Kuntu Repertory Theater, the Black Horizon Theater and August Wilson’s funeral as well as scenes and events in Pittsburgh neighborhoods, including Homewood, the Hill District and his native Manchester. ULS also houses his father’s photographs in the Frank Russell Hightower Photograph Collection.
It was difficult task, but Hightower chose a few of his favorite images from the collection and shared a backstory for each.
BIO
FRANK FLOYD HIGHTOWER, a native of Pittsburgh, received his early education in photography by working in his father’s darkroom. In his senior high school year, he was the yearbook photographer for the Oliver High School Omicron. After high school he spent a great deal of time experimenting with various traditional dark room techniques. He credits the enhancement of his creativity to meeting a group of local African American college students, community workers and artists at a Black Power meeting in the mid-sixties in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1966. It was the first time he met poet/playwrights Rob Penny and August Wilson both who had a profound effect on how he expressed his photography as an artist. He spent a great deal of his early years photographing the African American Cultural experience in Pittsburgh in the late sixties. He helped to establish the Black Horizon Theater created by Curtiss E. Porter, Rob Penny and August Wilson.
In the early seventies he attended and received his formal photography education from the Antonelli School of Photography in Philadelphia. Upon graduating in 1972 he worked as a Project Director under the guidance of his childhood friend William E. Strickland and Nationally recognized industrial and commercial photographer Fred Kenderson. He helped to establish the first photography component taught at the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild on Buena Visita street in Pittsburgh’s North Side in 1974.
He received the Gold Ribbon for Best Photograph in his Portrait class at Antonelli School of Photography and the Keeper of the Flame award presented by the Legacy Arts Project in 2010, for his Photography and Playwright work in the community. He has shown his photographs in numerous professional and juried exhibitions including the Pittsburgh Courier, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the Carnegie Lecture Hall of Pittsburgh, under the leadership of J Brooks Dendy III, the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts “Expressions of Excellence”. Creative Images 84 Sponsored by Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, The Sewickley Sweetwater Museum, the National Urban League Convention, the Senator John Heinz History Museum, the Frick Fine Arts Museum, the University of Pittsburgh’s McCarl Center, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the State Museum of Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Society of Artist as a member and exhibitionist, and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center at Wilberforce University in Ohio. August Wilson "2015, The Ground On Which I Stand."
In 1987 he became an active member of the Kuntu Repertoire Writers Workshop, writing his first play “LIFING”, at the suggestion of Rob Penny, he sent his play to the equity ETA Creative Arts Foundation theater in Chicago where his play was chosen to be performed in the 1997-98 season. He worked with the distinguished Dramaturge Paul Carter Harrison and Director Ron O.J. Parson who help him refine his play for stage production. His character “Blindman” Wiley McGee in “Lifting” was performed by classical blues singer Fernando Jones. Jones’ performance earn himself a nomination for a Chicago Jeff award. In 1998 his character “Minnie” Kincade in his play "Lifting" performed by actress Bridgett R. Williams won the Hattie McDaniel Award for best Featured Actress in a play presented by the Black Theater Alliance in Chicago. In 1999 Hightower’s play “Lifting” was performed by the Kuntu Repertory Theater, at the University of Pittsburgh’s Stephen Foster Theater under the guidance of Artistic Director Professor Vernell Lillie and guest director Eileen J. Morris, artistic director of The Ensemble Theatre in Houston Texas. Hightower’s other plays performed by the Kuntu Repertoire Theater are “The House that Carol Built” and “Ruby the Salt of the Earth”.
In the late nineties Hightower developed an interest in the art of stained glass by creating designs and symbols that relate to African American life.
ETA’S `LIFTING’ A WARM, WISE FIRST EFFORT
UPDATED: August 11, 2021 at 11:47 a.m.
Playwright Frank F. Hightower was born in Pittsburgh and worked in the late 1960s at the Black Horizons Theater, where he met and was influenced by a young August Wilson. The imprint of the author of “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is all over Hightower’s first play, “Lifting,” currently receiving its world premiere at the ETA Creative Arts Foundation (a group that justifiably prides itself on giving voice to new African-American writers).
Like many of Wilson’s seminal works, “Lifting” is set in a Pittsburgh of bygone days–in this case, an urban saloon just after World War II. The action here revolves around a troubled man named Buford (played by Charles Michael Moore), the owner of the bar. Like his famous mentor, Hightower does not so much construct a complex narrative as place a group of disparate characters in a single setting and allow them to interact, playing out their dreams and frustrations through seemingly simple conversation.
There’s even a strong musical metaphor at the heart of Hightower’s play–a sightless blues player called Blindman (superbly played by Fernando Jones). He occupies the center of the stage throughout most of the drama, delivering nuggets of wisdom while scratching out melodies on his guitar. The blues are a central theme here–one of the bar owner’s love interests is a singer named Mavis (the excellent Novona Dillard).
“Lifting” has many of the problems common with first plays. The dialogue rambles in places and when the narrative finally kicks into gear, plot revelations strain credulity. The overall arc of the play needs attention. And except for Blindman, the characters are insufficiently distinct.
Still, this a writer with palpable talent–ETA rarely gives mainstage productions to plays that are not at least full of potential. The play has both warmth and wisdom, and Hightower’s characters deliver many humorous and quietly profound observations on African-American life(from racism to the pain of love) as this likable play saunters along.
Featuring a vivid setting from Dorian Sylvain, Ron O. J. Parson’s competent production is consistently well-acted and believable.
https://youtu.be/1iZJk3pOhUg?feature=shared
http://pi.tt/FRussellHightower
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-11-27-9711270192-story.html
www.ffhphotographyarts.com