Harvey James Lewis was the first photographer in the Lewis line, a self-taught portrait specialist who opened the H. J. Lewis Art Studio behind his home in McDonald, Pennsylvania, in 1905. From that modest two-room shop he spent more than sixty years making wedding portraits, postcard views, and family photographs, thereby preserving a vital slice of black history in western Pennsylvania. Neighbors remembered the steady click of his large Eastman view camera and the smell of oil paints he used to hand-tint black-and-white prints.

Harvey’s passion quickly became a family affair.
He taught darkroom skills to his son, Matthew Sr., and let his grandson, future Pulitzer Prize winner Matthew Lewis Jr., carry film holders and watch him arrange group portraits under a painted backdrop. This sparked Matthew Jr.’s lifelong love of photography and set in motion a four-generation tradition that still endures. Though Harvey never sought wider fame, newspaper clippings and family albums testify to the thousands of local lives he documented and to the door he opened for the Lewis photographers who followed.