James Van Der Zee, Harlem in pictures
« American photographer (1886-1983), who documented the Harlem Renaissance for half a century. »
Born in Lenox, Massachusetts, James Van Der Zee settled in Harlem in 1906 and in 1916 opened the Guarantee Photo Studio. For fifty years he would be the unofficial portraitist of New York's Black community. Weddings, christenings, sports teams, religious organisations, activists — he fixed the face of the Harlem Renaissance.
He photographed Marcus Garvey in uniform, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Florence Mills, Adam Clayton Powell. His style: painted backdrops, drapery, meticulously dressed subjects, sometimes prints retouched in paint to add a veil, a ghost, a portrait within the portrait. A claimed and tended dignity.
Forgotten in the post-war years, he was rediscovered by the Metropolitan Museum's Harlem on My Mind exhibition in 1969. He was 83. He shot for Life, photographed Romare Bearden, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bill Cosby. He died at 96, leaving the visual archive of a community he had accompanied his whole life.