James Van Der Zee

A Commercial Studio Becomes a Community Record

Van Der Zee grew up in Lenox, Massachusetts, and received his first camera at around age fourteen. After moving to New York and working as a darkroom assistant and in photographic studios, he opened the Guarantee Photo Studio on 125th Street in Harlem in 1916. A portrait studio was both an artist’s workplace and a neighborhood service business, expected to answer requests for identification pictures, commemorative portraits, weddings, and family occasions. That commercial continuity made it possible to record life in the same neighborhood across an unusually long span of time.^*1

Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s was a center of “New Negro” culture in which literature, music, visual art, political activism, and Black-owned businesses flourished. The National Gallery of Art notes that Van Der Zee photographed both prominent figures and ordinary residents, creating images that countered racial stereotypes attached to Black life in the period.^*2

The studio was therefore more than a place to record faces. It was a social stage on which a newly employed person, a couple about to marry, a family with an automobile, a uniformed organization, a church group, or a sports team could decide what image of themselves would survive. The NGA exhibition presents studio portraits alongside photographs of nightclubs, stores, and religious, political, and athletic organizations as parts of the same social history of Harlem.^*3

Garveyism and the Organization That Chose How to Be Photographed

Van Der Zee received commissions from Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, photographing marches, parades, and members in uniform. Rendering an organization with the same care he gave an individual sitter also visualized the discipline, scale, and political presence of a Black community on its own terms. The uniforms and ordered ranks of Garveyism offered an image different from newspaper coverage that described Black political movements from the outside. Studio technique allowed the organization itself to shape how it appeared. Van Der Zee treated an individual’s carefully prepared public appearance and a political organization’s public image as extensions of the same portrait-making process.^*4

The New York Public Library archive preserves a substantial group of vintage prints from the 1910s through the 1930s, photographs related to the UNIA, and studio records. Van Der Zee’s historical importance rests less on a single iconic image than on the continuity produced by generations of residents returning to the same studio over decades.^*5

The Image the Client Wanted to Leave Behind

Van Der Zee selected backdrops, furniture, flowers, clothing, and lighting, then worked further on negatives and prints after exposure. Conservation research at the NGA has identified, through microscopy, pencil retouching used to modify shadows beneath the eyes and along the nose. These pencil marks make retouching more concrete than the abstract notion of “beautification.” The negative surface preserves the photographer’s minute decisions about which shadows to reduce and where to add a line.^*6

Retouching was not limited to removing perceived flaws. Rings and necklaces could be added, while clothing and skin tones could be adjusted. Presenting clients at their best was a standard service of portrait studios, but in Harlem it also meant responding to how residents wished to express achievement, attractiveness, and dignity.^*7

Recent technical studies by the NGA have examined negative retouching, drawing on prints, etching, and related processes separately, demonstrating that the final image was not completed at the instant of exposure.^*8

Multiple Exposure Layers Memory Within a Single Image

In funeral and family photographs, Van Der Zee sometimes used multiple exposure to superimpose the image of a deceased person or a symbolic scene over a portrait. Studio staging thus became more than a way to embellish appearance; it provided a form for memory in which images from different moments could occupy the same frame. Technical research has also examined evidence of multiple negatives and combined printing processes. When the dead and the living appear together, the photograph moves away from certifying that everyone was present at the same instant and becomes a means of visualizing the relationship a family wished to remember.^*9

In group portraits such as Harlem Society Tea, clothing, gaze, furniture, and interior decoration work together to construct a social self-image. The MoMA photograph provides an entry point into the Harlem Renaissance through the visual culture of sociability and neighborhood organization alongside its better-known stars of music and performance.^*10

The Smithsonian American Art Museum emphasizes how Van Der Zee’s studio portraits placed Black sitters at the center of the image and made possible forms of self-presentation that mainstream visual culture of the period rarely afforded them.^*23 The survival of G.G.G. Photo Studio, 272 Lenox Avenue from the 1940s also makes clear that this self-representation was grounded in a specific commercial studio in Harlem, not in an abstract ideal.^*24

Outside the Studio, He Recorded Whose Places These Were

Van Der Zee also photographed fish markets, restaurants, nightclubs, and streets. These were not anonymous urban views. They recorded, often by name, places owned, staffed, and frequented by Black residents.^*11

The Smithsonian’s Harlem Dancer records a body and costume onstage, while photographs of restaurant interiors preserve the details of commercial spaces. When portraits, performances, and stores are read within one photographer’s archive, the cultural history of Harlem emerges through the continual movement between individual faces and urban places.^*12

In team photographs such as New York Black Yankees, individual figures are carefully arranged within a single frame so that the organization itself becomes the subject of a public portrait. Works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art show that studio portraiture and the documentation of neighborhood organizations were not separate strands of Van Der Zee’s work.^*13

The 1974 Portfolio Re-Edited Earlier Negatives

After the 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind brought renewed attention from the art world, Van Der Zee produced the 1974 Portfolio of Eighteen Photographs, newly printed from earlier negatives. The Williams College Museum of Art situates the portfolio within the reassessment of his work that occurred during the era of the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements. Selecting eighteen images and issuing them as an edition was different from simply preserving old client photographs. The choice of what to re-present as representative work from negatives made decades earlier helped shape the version of Van Der Zee that museums would come to interpret.^*14

The meaning of these photographs was not fixed in the year they were taken. Images delivered to clients by a commercial studio in the 1920s were reprinted in the 1970s as works of Black cultural history and entered museum collections. Van Der Zee’s archive therefore includes this change in circulation as part of its history.^*15

The Library of Congress photograph Black Jews, Harlem, 1929 shows a group of Black Jews standing before the Moorish Zionist Temple, demonstrating that Van Der Zee’s neighborhood archive encompassed the self-representation of religious communities as well as family portraiture.^*21 Likewise, Swimming team, Harlem, 1925 preserves local children and an athletic organization as a group portrait, showing how the aesthetic staging of the studio and the social history of the neighborhood remained continuous within the same body of work.^*22

The Harlem Book of the Dead — Portraits of the Dead Were Collaborative Too

Van Der Zee’s funeral photographs show that studio staging was not confined to celebrating the achievements of the living. The archive acquired by the Met contains a substantial group of “funerary tableaux” showing the deceased in their coffins. In the 1978 book The Harlem Book of the Dead, these photographs were combined with poems by Owen Dodson, conversations with Camille Billops, and an introduction by Toni Morrison.^*29

These images did more than record the deceased as they appeared at the funeral. In response to family wishes, Van Der Zee used multiple exposure and retouching to layer flowers, religious imagery, portraits made during life, and celestial motifs into the picture. The same methods used in the studio to arrange the clothing and backgrounds of living sitters became part of a communal ritual concerned with the form in which the dead would be remembered.^*30

Multiple exposure, then, was not an ornamental experiment. It answered the need to place the living and the dead, earthly life and a religious afterlife, the individual face and family memory within a single image. The method makes clear that Van Der Zee’s conception of portraiture addressed life’s transitions in a continuum that extended through death.^*29

The 1969 “Discovery” and the History That Preceded It

Art histories often treat the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 exhibition as the moment of Van Der Zee’s “rediscovery,” but he had already spent nearly half a century making photographs for clients in Harlem. The NGA biography likewise places his long commercial career before museum recognition at the center of his history.^*16

The Studio Museum in Harlem presents everyday scenes and idealized portraits as a continuous field of work and, in 2021, established a partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to preserve and study the archive. The reassessment gains particular significance because the records of a neighborhood studio entered a major museum collection while an institution rooted in Harlem continues to participate in their interpretation. The material acquired by the Met includes roughly 20,000 lifetime prints, about 30,000 negatives, as well as equipment, correspondence, and related records. This scale makes it possible to study finished photographs together with the processes of commission, exposure, retouching, and preservation, providing a basis for research on the studio as both an artistic practice and a record of neighborhood history.^*17

Documentary and Staging in the Same Archive

In photographs such as Evening Attire, discussed in SAAM’s educational materials, carefully arranged clothing and bodily posture communicate how Black citizens in the first half of the twentieth century wished to present themselves. The image has documentary value not because staging is absent, but because the staging records the concrete form of social aspiration.^*18

Current conservation research examines Van Der Zee’s retouching techniques as evidence of the photographer’s decisions and the construction of the client’s image. This approach complicates the assumption that photographic authenticity can be measured by the absence of manipulation.^*19

Van Der Zee’s most consequential contribution to photographic history is not a single definitive image representing Harlem from the outside. It is the rare long-term archive created through the repeated photographing of families, organizations, stores, social events, mourning, and celebration in studios and on the street, an archive through which it is possible to trace how a community chose to remember itself. Crucially, the archive does not establish one “typical” image of Black life. Portraits that display success coexist with funerary photographs, stores, sports teams, and political organizations, allowing differences of class, generation, taste, and aspiration within the same community to remain visible.^*20

Harlem on My Mind Was Both a “Rediscovery” and a Crisis of Representation

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind brought Van Der Zee’s name to wide attention in the art world while also provoking intense protest over who had the authority to speak about Harlem and from which institution. The exhibition did not present paintings or sculptures by Black artists. Instead, photographs by Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, and others were used as social-historical display material alongside newspaper texts, sound, and large-scale photographic reproductions. Harlem artists formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, asked “Harlem on Whose Mind?,” and criticized the failure to meaningfully incorporate the community’s advice.^*25

This controversy cannot be separated from the history of Van Der Zee’s work. In his studio, clients chose clothing and poses and participated in the making of their images, including the process of retouching. In the 1969 exhibition, by contrast, the photographs were detached from the circumstances of individual commissions and collaborative image-making and absorbed into a larger museum narrative about “Harlem.” Art-historical research has examined the exhibition as an institutional conflict over the participation of Black artists and neighborhood residents.^*26 The significance of Van Der Zee’s work therefore extends beyond the production of affirmative images of Black life. The reception history of the archive also demonstrates that the right to make a portrait and the later authority to interpret and exhibit that portrait are not the same thing.

Returning Interpretation to a Community Archive

Since the 2000s, the Studio Museum in Harlem has placed Van Der Zee’s archive at the center of educational programs in which younger photographers consider community, culture, and self-representation.^*27 The NYPL digital collection likewise presents studio portraits, the UNIA, streets, shops, and public spaces as parts of one archive.^*28 Recent reassessment has therefore done more than museumize the photographs as attractive images of the Harlem Renaissance. It has also returned them to use as sources through which a community can investigate its own history.

The Story That He Was “Discovered in 1969” Is Also Being Reconsidered

Recent scholarship has also revised the familiar art-historical narrative that Van Der Zee was suddenly “discovered” in 1969. Emily Chestnut Boon has recovered the fact that Cecil Beaton had already reproduced and discussed Van Der Zee’s photographs in his 1938 book Cecil Beaton’s New York, placing the Harlem photographer back within an interwar transatlantic photographic culture.^*31

This matters. A neighborhood studio in Harlem did not become historically significant only when a predominantly white museum recognized it. The photographs had already been used and given meaning through other circuits—clients, the Black press, community organizations, and family albums. Beginning the story with museum history obscures that much longer history of reception.^*31

Atlantic City, 1930 is also important for understanding Van Der Zee’s work outside the studio. LACMA associates the site with Missouri Beach, a shoreline effectively restricted to Black visitors, showing that his documentary photographs recorded forms of Black leisure and sociability shaped within Jim Crow segregation.^*32

A research lecture by Emily Boon organized by the Williams College Museum of Art similarly revisits Van Der Zee’s studio portraiture as a “forgotten practice” and reconsiders how the photographs functioned within African American visual culture. An important direction in current research is to move beyond later distinctions between fine-art and commercial photography and return to what clients actually needed photographs to do.^*33