Van Der Zee, James Augustus

Impact on the world

Opening the Guarantee Photo Studio (later GGG Studio) on West 125th Street in 1916, Van Der Zee became Harlem's most sought-after photographer through the 1920s and 30s, using elaborate props, backdrops, and heavy negative retouching to give his sitters — from ordinary families celebrating weddings and graduations to Marcus Garvey, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Countee Cullen — a deliberate aura of glamour and dignity rarely afforded Black Americans in mainstream imagery of the era; his 1919 photographs of the returning “Harlem Hellfighters” victory parade and his extensive documentation of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association remain irreplaceable historical records. After decades of declining commissions and near-poverty, his rediscovery by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its landmark (and controversial) 1969 exhibition “Harlem on My Mind” revived his career in his 80s, leading to a late-life resurgence that included photographing a 21-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982, the year before Van Der Zee's death; the Met formally assumed stewardship of his complete photographic archive in 2021.

Life & background

Born June 29, 1886, in Lenox, Massachusetts, to Elizabeth and John Van Der Zee, former household staff to President Ulysses S. Grant, he received his first camera at 14 after winning a sales contest and initially aspired to a music career as a violinist and pianist, even founding the Harlem Orchestra after moving to New York around 1906. He worked as a darkroom assistant before opening his studio in 1916 with first wife Gaynella Greenlee, whom he married in 1920 after the studio's founding; his beloved daughter Rachel's 1927 death from appendicitis at 19 led him to create deeply personal funeral photography later collected in The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978), with a foreword by Toni Morrison. Evicted from Harlem amid financial hardship in the 1970s after his first archival deal, he was rescued from obscurity by art dealer Donna Mussenden, whom he married in 1978, and spent his final years newly celebrated, receiving a Living Legacy Award from President Jimmy Carter in 1979 before dying in Washington, D.C., on May 15, 1983, at age 96.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; Studio Museum in Harlem; National Gallery of Art