James Latimer Allen

James Latimer Allen was born in New York on the seventh of February 1907 and schooled at DeWitt Clinton — Countee Cullen's school — where the camera club first put a lens in his hands. At sixteen he entered a four-year apprenticeship at Stone, Van Dresser and Company, a white-owned illustration house whose owners nurtured Black talent, and in April 1927 he first showed his work at the Exhibition of Young Negro Artists that Wallace Thurman arranged on West 136th Street.

That same year, at twenty, he opened his portrait studio at 213 West 121st Street — later moving to Seventh Avenue — and the New Negro movement came to sit. Langston Hughes in 1927, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Aaron Douglas, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomburg: his quiet, dignified portraits ran in Opportunity, The Messenger, and The Crisis, and Hughes himself wrote in praise of the young photographer's gift.

The Harmon Foundation, which admitted only five photographers in its whole history, honored him most of all — an honorable mention in 1927 and its prize for photographic work in 1930, 1931, and 1933, with a place in its 1934 film A Study of Negro Artists. Through the Depression he taught at Augusta Savage's Harlem Community Art Center; the war took him into the Army and the Office of Strategic Services at Washington, processing intelligence film.

He stayed in Washington in government service and never reopened the studio; he died there in 1977 — the record keeps no certain day — and the boxed remnants of the studio were discarded. Fewer than two hundred identified photographs survive, scattered through the great Black archives, until Camara Dia Holloway's 1999 Yale exhibition returned his name to the story he had pictured. Honored be James Latimer Allen, who gave the New Negro movement its face.