"Don't ask me to pick a favorite picture (as I asked Willis to), but as I turn the page I see a candid shot called Speedo and Smiley in Harlem, 1969, by Joe Harris. The two men are meeting on an empty sidewalk among some cookie-cutter apartment buildings. The urban neighborhood is stark, almost grim, but the friends are laughing as they shake hands, glad to see each other, and you have to smile, too, for the sheer joy in their faces," an excerpt from Michael Kernan's article, Portraits of Her People, Smithsonian Magazine, December 2000.

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In an excerpt from a CNN review of the book, Sheana Ochoa writes, "In the 1970's, when universities began offering degrees in photography, the expression of black photography moved from the documentary to the artistic, although the most provocative photos offer both aesthetics, such as Joe Harris' photograph of two friends meeting on a street in Harlem. The energy emitted by the subjects, Speedo and Smiley, is so electric, one feels to have personally known them for years."

This book, edited by Barbara Head Millstein and Clyde Taylor is the published companion book to The Brooklyn Museum's highly anticipated 2001 exhibit, Committed to the Image:  Contemporary Black Photographers.   In a January 2001 preview of the show written for Art Forum, Meghan Daily wrote, "Restricted to currently practicing photographers, 'Committed to the Image' nonetheless promises a historical scope. To be included: iconic civil rights images and portraits of cultural figures, as well as recent work addressing the political and social struggles of today and the emergence of the black middle class. Two years in the making, this ambitious show should prove worth the wait."

In the July 1972 issue of Art Direction Magazine, Joe was featured along with Richard Avedon and Annie Liebowitz in their "Class of '72."