James Latimer Allen

James Latimer Allen was born on the twenty-ninth of December 1907 at New York, the son of James Allen — a Caribbean-born hotel waiter — and Mary Latimer. He was raised in the West Indian Black community of central Harlem.

He was apprenticed at fifteen in 1922 to the Harlem studio of the white portrait photographer Stone — and completed the principal apprenticeship in 1924. He enrolled at the Photographic School of the New York Institute of Photography in 1924 and completed the photography certificate in 1926.

He opened the principal James Latimer Allen Studio at 213 West 121st Street at Harlem in 1927 — the principal portrait studio of the principal Harlem Renaissance literary community of the late 1920s. The Allen Studio operated at the West 121st Street address from 1927 to 1939.

He produced across the twelve years at the Allen Studio the principal portrait record of the Harlem Renaissance — including the principal portraits of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain Locke, Augusta Savage, Aaron Douglas, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and the principal New Negro literary movement of the period.

He was the principal commissioned portraitist of the Crisis magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People across the 1930s — and the principal commissioned portraitist of the Opportunity magazine of the National Urban League.

His principal Hughes portraits of 1927 and 1932 — published on the principal dust jackets of Hughes's Not Without Laughter of 1930 and The Ways of White Folk of 1934 — are at this day the principal extant photographic record of the young Langston Hughes.

He closed the Allen Studio at the conclusion of the Great Depression in 1939 — and was hired by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project as principal photographer of the Harlem Community Art Center from 1939 to 1942.

He served in the United States Army across 1942 to 1945 in the segregated Signal Corps photographic unit at the European theatre.

He was hired by the Lerner Stores Corporation at New York in 1946 as principal corporate photographer — and held the principal Lerner photographer position from 1946 to his retirement in 1972.

He died at New York on the eighteenth of June 1977 of natural causes, at sixty-nine.

He is honored here as the principal portraitist of the Harlem Renaissance literary movement.