AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Studio portraits of Harlem life in the 1920s and 1930s: families, weddings, soldiers, clubs and funerals
- Worked in
- Black and white, often retouched by hand and sometimes hand-colored
- Camera
- Glass plates and film in his studio; a Calumet box camera in his last years
- Also
- Photographed Marcus Garvey’s UNIA in 1924; his archive is now held by the Met and the Studio Museum in Harlem
- Start with
- VanDerZee, Photographer: 1886–1983 (Harry N. Abrams, 1993)
James VanDerZee (1886–1983) was an American photographer who ran a portrait studio in Harlem for about half a century. His pictures of families, weddings, soldiers, shops and funerals are one of the richest records of Black life in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. Wide fame came only in his eighties, after the 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The story
In 1900, a 14-year-old boy in Lenox, Massachusetts, answered an advertisement. If he sold 20 packets of perfume at 10 cents each, he would win a camera. It took him a couple of months. The prize came in a package: a simple camera, chemicals, small glass plates and cardboard trays covered with wax. But the camera was so crude that he could not make a single picture with it. So James VanDerZee learned the instruction booklet by heart.
Soon he had a better camera and became the school photographer. Music was his other gift, as he played the violin and the piano. In 1906 he moved to Harlem and worked as a waiter and an elevator operator. His first real photography job came in 1915, in the darkroom of a department store studio in Newark, New Jersey. The pay was five dollars a week. Customers liked him because he took his time posing them.
In 1916 he opened his own place, the Guarantee Photo Studio on 125th Street, with Gaynella Greenlee, who later became his wife. During World War I, young men came in before they left for Europe. “It looked like everybody was going into the army,” he remembered. In 1924 he photographed Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Most sitters, though, were Harlem families in their best clothes, and Sunday was the busiest day.
For him, a picture was not finished when the shutter closed. He used painted backdrops, props and costumes. With a pencil he retouched his negatives, softening faces and even drawing in rings and bracelets. In Alpha Phi Alpha Basketball Team, curators at the National Gallery of Art found soft retouching under the young men’s eyes.
Later, cheap home cameras took away much of his business. Then, in December 1967, Reginald McGhee, a researcher for the Met, found his studio. VanDerZee showed him box after box of negatives from the 1920s and 1930s. In 1969 they became the heart of Harlem on My Mind. One of his best-known pictures, Couple in Raccoon Coats, shows a man and a woman in huge fur coats beside their car, three years into the Great Depression.
The boy who could not get one picture out of his first camera had learned to make the camera follow him. “You can see the picture before it’s taken; then it’s up to you to get the camera to see,” he said.
The work
- 1886Born in Lenox, Massachusetts
- 1900Wins his first camera by selling perfume
- 1906Moves to Harlem, New York
- 1915First photography job, in a Newark department store studio
- 1916Opens the Guarantee Photo Studio on 125th Street
- 1924Photographs Marcus Garvey’s UNIA
- 1969His work is the core of Harlem on My Mind at the Met
- 1978Publishes The Harlem Book of the Dead
- 1983Dies in Washington, D.C.
Lessons
Learn your tools. Before he could make a single picture, VanDerZee knew his camera’s instruction booklet by heart.
Take your time with people. Even in a department store studio, customers came back because he posed them with care.
The picture is not done at the click. Backdrops, props, retouching and hand-coloring were all part of how he showed his sitters at their best.
Try this: make a studio-style portrait of a friend at home. Choose one backdrop, one prop and their best clothes. Spend a full hour on the pose and the light before you decide which frame is the picture.
Gear
Glass plate negatives: his first camera kit in 1900 came with small glass plates, and his archive still holds glass plates along with film negatives and prints.
Retouching pencil: according to the National Gallery of Art, he most likely drew on his negatives with a graphite pencil to soften faces and add jewelry.
Box camera: when he reopened a studio in the early 1980s, he used a Calumet box camera he had worked with about 20 years before.
The specific cameras of his main studio years in the 1920s and 1930s are not well documented, so we do not list models.
Books
VanDerZee, Photographer: 1886–1983 (Harry N. Abrams, 1993). The catalogue of the retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, held ten years after his death. The text is by the photography historian Deborah Willis-Braithwaite, with a biographical essay by Rodger C. Birt. It follows his whole career, from the early family pictures in Lenox to the Harlem studio years. The best single book if you want to see the range of his work and understand his life.
The Harlem Book of the Dead (Morgan & Morgan, 1978). His third monograph, made with Owen Dodson and Camille Billops, with a foreword by Toni Morrison. It collects the funeral portraits he made in Harlem between the wars. A quiet and unusual book for readers interested in how photography was part of grief and memory in a community.
The World of James Van DerZee: A Visual Record of Black America (Grove Press, 1969). Edited by Reginald McGhee, the researcher who found VanDerZee’s studio while preparing Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Published in the same year as the exhibition, it pairs his photographs with his own memories from interviews, such as the busy years of World War I. Look for it if you want to see his work as the public first discovered it.
The James VanDerZee Studio (Art Institute of Chicago, 2004). A book on his studio work by the curator Colin Westerbeck, with an essay by the photographer Dawoud Bey. The studio, with its backdrops, props and careful posing, was the center of his art. Good for photographers who make portraits and want to learn from a master of the studio.
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