While James Van Der Zee is widely known and praised for his studio portraits from the Harlem Renaissance era, much of the diversity and expansive reach of his work has been overlooked. From the major role his studio played for decades photographing ordinary people and events in the Harlem ...
With his brother Walter, James Van Der Zee departed for Harlem, New York, in 1906; once there, he held jobs as a waiter and elevator operator. He married Kate Brown in 1907 and the newlyweds moved to Virginia, where Van Der Zee would do photography work for the Hampton Institute. After...
That somebody was James Van Der Zee, a Black photographer who not only knew how to snap the picture, but turn it into a portrait of respectable, highly visible, middle-class culture. The National Gallery of Art’s current exhibition, James Van Der Zee’s Photographs: A Portrait of Harlem,...
Like James Van Der Zee's Harlem Book of the Dead, the poem is about the crossroads of life and death. Like the Haitian Voudoun God Ghede, whose capacity for living is legendary but whose symbol is the cross on the tomb, the Hughes poem and the Van Der Zee book show how the bodies...
Why is James Van Der Zee important?Influential Transient:James Augustus Van Der Zee was born in Lenox, Massachusetts on June 29, 1886. He was one of six Van Der Zee children. When he was 20, Van Der Zee moved to Harlem but only stayed for a year, soon moving to Virginia after ...
Directed by the master who started out as an editor working withVal Lewton,ÂRobert Wise, created this iconic film which gave the science fiction genre a level of artistic authenticity. It’s memorable and sensational for so many of us because ofÂWises’directing,Leo Tover’sphotography, ...
The book was the first to publish and consider works by the African American studio photographer James Van Der Zee. Yet this account of Van Der Zee has been overlooked by scholars and relegated to footnotes, feasibly because of Beaton's dismissive and tactless consideration of the now highly ...