For more than six decades, Van Der Zee chronicled Black life in Harlem, where he operated a successful portrait studio. During the 1920s and ’30s, against the backdrop of Harlem’s thriving intellectual, cultural, and creative scene, Van Der Zee developed a signature style of glamorous portraiture. Aiming to craft photographs that were “better-looking than the person,” often through retouching, he claimed to put his “heart and soul” into conveying the personalities of individual sitters. His photographs, which also include group portraits of social and religious organizations, remain some of the most important documents of the individuals and communities that animated Harlem during the twentieth century.
2024
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James Van Der Zee
American, 1886–1983 15 works onlineJames Augustus Van Der Zee was a stalwart documentarian of Black life in Harlem. Assiduously committed to Harlem’s striving and successful denizens over the course of 60 years, his pictures teem with possibility, their subjects shimmering with glamour.
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Diaspora
Can refer to the movement or dispersal of a group of people with a shared identity or homeland from one place to another, or to the group of people itself.
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