The Photographer Who Captured the Glamour of the Harlem Renaissance

At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, photographer James Van Der Zee’s uptown studio became a site of fantasy and self-invention. In his 1920 photograph Eve’s Daughter, for example, an African-American woman embodies a joyful, edenic figure, standing in front of a studio backdrop that pictures an idyllic lake and trees. She wears a sheer wrap, with a wreath of leaves crowning her dark, upswept hair and sprigs of white flowers lying by her bare feet. Van Der Zee hand-etched marks onto the negative that detail the leaves and flowers, and that suggest a pair of swans in the water, further heightening the sense of some magical drama out in nature.

Van Der Zee, whose work is currently on view at New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery through April 27th, became famous for taking glamorous studio portraits as Harlem’s culture blossomed. Yet he hardly set out to offer a documentarian’s lens on the era: He merely offered a service for people in his own community.As poets such as Langston Hughes lyrically translated the spirit of their times into verse, and as painters like Aaron Douglas created imagery of freedom on canvas, Van Der Zee used black-and-white film to herald a new era of African-American autonomy and creativity. Contemporary black photographers and filmmakers such as Dawoud Bey, Jamel Shabazz, and Barry Jenkins have cited him as a major influence.

“I think there’s a lot to learn from his having been a resident artist.…He lived and worked there,” said the photographer’s widow, Donna Van Der Zee. “He knew the people, knew the community, and they knew him.”

Van Der Zee was born in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1886. His parents—former household employees of President Ulysses S. Grant—encouraged creativity in their home. At age 14, Van Der Zee won a camera by selling the most perfumed sachets in a contest—but the camera had broken glass and didn’t work. He kept the instructions, saved up five dollars, and bought his own.

Around 1906, Van Der Zee moved to Harlem, dreaming of becoming a musician. He was a pianist and violinist, and founded the Harlem Orchestra with four other performers. He also worked as a music teacher, but he wasn’t making enough money to survive. “Because of the arrival of the phonograph, he said he could hear himself playing, but he wasn’t getting paid,” Donna recalled. In 1915, Van Der Zee got a job as a darkroom assistant at a New Jersey department store. Despite the era’s prevalent racism, the white clientele trusted and valued him and his work.

The position gave Van Der Zee enough technical experience to confidently open his own studio in Harlem around 1915; he called it Guarantee Photo Studio. Throughout his six-decade career, he’d move shop three more times within the same neighborhood, becoming a fixture of the community.

In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art included Van Der Zee’s work in its controversial exhibition “Harlem on My Mind.” Despite the widespread protests over the show, which included mostly white artists who didn’t live in the neighborhood, it also introduced its audience to Van Der Zee’s warm, intimate style.

Van Der Zee gained a reputation for making particularly flattering portraits. “He wanted to have his clients feel that they were looking handsome or beautiful,” Donna said, noting that his sitters brought their best clothes to the shoot. Such embellishments are evident in Wedding Couple (1934), which features a man in a black tuxedo and a woman holding a bouquet of flowers in a glowing white gown. Van Der Zee’s hand-coloration—dabs of green and pink on the petals—adds a dash of vibrancy and celebration to a photograph that captures a joyful, landmark moment in his subjects’ lives.