Lost (and Found) Artist Series: James Van Der Zee

Artland’s Lost (and Found) Artist Series features artists who were originally omitted from the mainstream art canon or largely invisible for most of their career. Today’s lost (and found) artist is photographer James Van Der Zee (1886-1983), a figure who immortalised the Harlem Renaissance movement in photographs. Van Der Zee documented the intellectual, artistic, and everyday life in Harlem in the early 20^th century as it emerged as one of the principal urban centers of the African American population.  

James Van Der Zee’s Early Years

James Van Der Zee was born in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1886. Early on, he showed a great gift for music and he initially aspired to be a professional violinist. His other great passion was photography. At the age of fourteen, Van Der Zee received his first camera, with which he took hundreds of photographs of his family and his hometown. Van Der Zee was one of the first people in Lenox to own a camera, providing early documentation of life in small town New England.

In 1906, Van Der Zee moved to New York City where he, his father and his brother worked as waiters and elevator operators. But Van Der Zee was already a skilled pianist and violinist, and created the Harlem Orchestra together with four other musicians. In 1915, he moved to Newark, New Jersey, where he got a job as a darkroom assistant and as a photographer in a commercial portrait studio. It was 1916 when Van Der Zee returned to New York and moved to Harlem, just at the time when a large wave of black migrants and immigrants were moving to that part of the city. Van Der Zee chose to focus solely on photography, leaving behind the more uncertain life of a musician. That same year, he opened his first photography studio on West 135^th Street. Two years later, he established the Guarantee Photo Studio in Harlem together with his second wife, Gaynella Greenlee.

Documenting the Harlem Renaissance            

Van Der Zee recognised the burgeoning cultural life amongst his peers in this part of town, determining a moment in time that had to be captured.. The intellectual and artistic life in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s was flourishing, and Van Der Zee produced thousands of photographs of the people of Harlem. In his studio, he created formal, posed photographs of Harlem residents and artists often wearing their best clothes and presenting their cultivated taste, in addition to street photography in the neighbourhood, where he essayed more free form works of cabarets, restaurants, barbershops, church services and street scenes. He once said: “I wanted to make the camera take what I thought should be there.” It didn’t take long for Van Der Zee to become the most successful photographer in Harlem, and his subjects included the likes of activist Marcus Garvey, entertainer and dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and poet Countee Cullen.

The residents of Harlem entrusted Van Der Zee with the documentation of their important personal life events, including weddings, funerals, and social events. The dreams and aspirations of the Harlem people were the dreams and aspirations of Van Der Zee as well – together, they strove for self-determination, racial pride, and visibility in their city and country. The aim of Van Der Zee’s photography was to capture the personality, character, and individual beauty of his subjects. His work was amongst the most eloquent advocates pushing for greater visibility and validation of African Americans in the emergent cities of the north in the decades after the Civil War.

1930s – Decline in Work

 By the early 1930s, Van Der Zee’s income from his photography work started to decline. This was in part due to the economic crisis of the Great Depression which effected the circumstances of many of his customers, and in part due to the growing popularity of personal cameras, which were becoming increasingly affordable for more mainstream consumption. Van Der Zee managed to get by with his photo studio where he shot passport photos, did photo restorations, and took on other miscellaneous photography jobs. He continued working like this for several decades.