James Van Der Zee was a master of composition, but his most brilliant works were created not behind his violin or piano, but through the lens of his camera.

When he made his way to Harlem in 1906, it wasn’t his first time. He’d visited often from his small hometown in Massachusetts, and marveled at the pictures he’d taken in the big city since he was 14, honing his eye along the way.

But photography couldn’t pay the bills, and surprisingly enough, his skill as a musician could, so he created and subsequently packed theater houses with the Harlem Orchestra. He even performed with jazz icons, but still his eye wandered back to the camera. Having regularly worked small jobs between music gigs, it was no surprise when in 1915, he landed one as a darkroom assistant whose skill was proven so quickly that he was promoted to portraitist within a year, and opened his own studio on 135th Street within two.

His talent couldn’t have come to fruition at a more fortuitous time for both James and the residents of Harlem. With the start of the Harlem Renaissance around 1918, black art, literature and culture was gaining international recognition, and being celebrated within black communities on its own merits and for its success in the mainstream. Black photographers were included in this praise, and also key to capturing the social, economic, and personal benefits that many black people were enjoying for the first time in America. In James’s studio, some of the most meaningful moments in everyday black lives and in all of black history were captured on film. Baby pictures, young newlyweds, funerals, civic groups and iconic portraits of black leaders and celebrities were all included in his exquisite body of work which spanned until 1982, nearly right up until his death a year later at the age of 96.

But his photographs are so much more than the sum of their parts. He didn’t just capture a black middle-class in the height of their recognition by a society that had previously enslaved them. At the start of his professional career, he made it a point to sign, date and number each of his photographs. Such care for his craft and attention to detail meant that when his work was discovered in 1967 by a researcher for The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, his then 75,000 photographs became one of the most fully verifiable and extensive archives of black life since slave records. Because marriage/birth records and the ability to freely own property weren’t available to black people until in some cases well after the Civil War ended in 1865, further proof of our generations, personal wealth and especially a positive visual record of both beyond often sparse government and media documentation was tremendous to the culture and to the further preservation of our place in America’s past.

As a black man positioned behind a camera during one of the most significant eras of black history, James was able to show the whole world an entirely novel perspective on his subjects, no matter their status or the gravity of the occasion. When asked why and how he created such ethereal and regal images, he remarked “I wanted to make the camera take what I thought should be there.” What James Van Der Zee and his camera left behind was a legacy of black excellence.

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