James Van Der Zee

James Augustus Van Der Zee was born in Lenox, Massachusetts, on the twenty-ninth of June 1886, the second of six children of formerly enslaved parents who had worked as butler and maid at the Berkshire estate of Ulysses S. Grant. He took up photography at fourteen with a small box camera he won through a magazine subscription.

He moved to New York in 1906 and opened his own studio at 109 West 135th Street in Harlem in 1916. The Guarantee Photo Studio operated there — under successive names — for the next fifty years. The studio became the principal portrait studio of the Harlem Renaissance.

Van Der Zee photographed Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association from 1924 (the studio retained the official UNIA portrait contract for the duration of Garvey's American operations). He photographed Adam Clayton Powell Sr., the wedding parties and family groups of professional-class Harlem across four decades, the boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, the singer Florence Mills, and Bishop "Daddy" Grace. He produced approximately a hundred and twenty-five thousand negatives over his working life.

His commercial work declined in the post-war decades as Black professional photographers proliferated. He was effectively rediscovered in 1969 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Reginald McGhee included his work in the controversial exhibition Harlem on My Mind. He was eighty-three.

The final decade and a half of his life produced a creative renaissance: late portraits of Romare Bearden (also placed in this archive), Muhammad Ali (also placed in this archive), Bill Cosby, Eubie Blake, and Jean-Michel Basquiat — many made for the National Portrait Gallery.

He died in Washington, D.C., on the fifteenth of May 1983, age ninety-six.

He is honored here as the photographer whose studio held the visual record of Harlem.