The Harlem Renaissance was a period of Black art, music, writing and thought in Harlem, a neighbourhood of New York, in the 1920s and 1930s. One photographer recorded the life of this community more fully than anyone else: James VanDerZee.
In 1916, VanDerZee and his wife, Gaynella Greenlee, opened the Guarantee Photo Studio in Harlem. Local people came to him for weddings, funerals and family portraits. Well-known people came too, among them the political leader Marcus Garvey.
VanDerZee did not simply record faces. He retouched his negatives by hand, so his sitters looked their best.
Early in 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art included his work in the exhibition Harlem on My Mind. This brought his pictures to a wide audience. Today the Met holds his archive, about 20,000 prints and 30,000 negatives.
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