JAMES VANDERZEE
American
James VanDerZee was one of the great portraitists
of the twentieth century. Born in 1886 in Lenox,
Massachusetts, he came of age as the photographic
medium gained credibility as an art form, and he
used the camera to imbue representations of his New
York Harlem community with elegance and dignity.
VanDerZee first acquired a camera as a teenager
and quickly built his own darkroom to pursue the
photographic process. He married Kate Brown in
1907 and soon had two young children. After several
years with his family in Massachusetts and Virginia,
VanDerZee moved his family to New York to join
his siblings as well as to explore his interest in music.
Although he performed with the Harlem Orchestra
and often sat in with the Fletcher Henderson Orches-
tra, VanDerZee’s youthful hobby of photography
recaptured his attention. He first worked as a dark-
room technician at a photographic studio in New-
ark, New Jersey, and then opened a portrait studio
at his sister’s Toussaint Conservatory of Art and
Music in 1912. A few years later in 1917, VanDerZee
opened the Guarantee Photo Studio on West 135th
Street in Harlem, which would eventually be known
as the G.G.G. Studio. Over the next two decades,
VanDerZee rose to become the preeminent portrai-
tist of his Harlem neighborhood, and contributed an
important range of images to the intellectual and
artistic development during the years that have
come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.
VanDerZee is best known for his portraits of both
large groups and single sitters. In the studio he used
a variety of painted backdrops to locate his subjects
in an atmosphere of domestic elegance or contem-
plative nature.Wedding Portrait: ‘Future Expecta-
tions’(1926) features a young couple in fashionable
wedding attire seated before atrompe l’oeilfireplace.
The groom looks gently at his bride, and she holds a
lush bouquet of flowers and looks out at the viewer.
In this photograph VanDerZee also added a narra-
tive component through the use of a second nega-
tive—a ‘‘ghost’’ image of a young child playing with
a doll at the feet of the newlyweds implies the cou-
ple’s hope for a family. Without sacrificing the form-
ality of a standard wedding portrait, VanDerZee
introduced creative elements in the staging and print-
ing of his studio portraits to generate unique and
personal commemorative images for his sitters.
During the 1920s, VanDerZee also became the
official photographer for the activities of the Uni-
ted Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in
New York. He produced a number of images that
document the pageantry and power of UNIA’s
military-style events, as well as strong portraits of
the movement’s leader, Marcus Garvey. Perhaps
VanDerZee’s best-known image isCouple in Rac-
coon Coats(1932), which depicts a man and a
woman in luxurious raccoon coats before a shiny
Cadillac stretched across the horizontal composi-
tion. The man sits inside the car and both figures
gaze back at the camera with ease. The open car
door and the rising stairs of the residential build-
ings behind the car contribute to an overall sense of
growing socio-economic power and possibility
among young African Americans during this era.
With their overtly contrived settings and dark-
room tricks, and their modern, confident sitters,
VanDerZee’s photographs look simultaneously
old fashioned and contemporary. They seem to
suggest the possibility of creating a visual history
for African Americans that refers to the nineteenth
century—a time when the few photographic por-
traits of African Americans would have been made
largely to document slaves as property—even as
they assertively claim a modern identity for a grow-
ing middle class of African Americans in the twen-
tieth century. Through his portraits VanDerZee
generated both a visual past and future for his
African American community.
VanDerZee continued his studio practice for
many decades, but by mid-century his portraits
had become increasingly outdated and his clientele
diminished. G.G.G. Studio finally closed its doors
in 1969 and at age 82, VanDerZee and his second
wife, Gaynella, found themselves living in pover-
ty. That same year, however, VanDerZee’s earlier
work was featured in the controversial exhibition
Harlem on My Mindat the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, and his career experienced a
rediscovery as many museums, eager to develop
their attention to photography as a fine art, sought
out VanDerZee as an exemplar of artistic portrait
photography in the early twentieth century. More-VANDERZEE, JAMES