VAN DER ZEE, JAMES (aka James Augustus Van Der Zee or VanDerZee, 29 June 1886–15 May 1983), an African American photographer best known for his work chronicling the Harlem Renaissance and Black New Yorkers. Van Der Zee subjects included Marcus Garvey, among other prominent Black Americans of the time.
Born in Lenox, Massachusetts, Van Der Zee took an early interest in photography as a teenager, improvising a darkroom in his parents’ home. He became one of the first to document the life of his small New England community. In 1906, Van Der Zee moved with his father and brother to Harlem. Alongside photography, Van Der Zee was also a skilled pianist and an aspiring professional violinist. He founded and performed with a five-piece group called the Harlem Orchestra. In March 1907, he married and moved with his wife back to Lenox, and then to Newark, New Jersey, in 1915—eventually returning to Harlem in 1916, as many more Black Americans and immigrants were moving to that part of the city due to the Great Migration from the South. There, he set up a studio at the Toussaint Conservatory of Art and Music, which his sister—born Jennie Louise but known there as Madame E. Toussaint—had founded in 1911. In 1916, he launched his own photography studio on West 125th Street in Harlem, which grew exponentially through the First World War and into the prosperous 1920s and 1930s. Van Der Zee produced hundreds of photographs of Harlem’s growing middle class, including its most prominent artists, musicians, and writers, and was in 1924 commissioned as a photographer for the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), for which he took thousands of photographs that remain essential documents to this day. In 1969, Van Der Zee gained worldwide recognition when his work was featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the exhibition, Harlem on My Mind.