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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Whether it was a bride in her glamorous white gown with a train draped perfectly behind her, a soldier off to war, or a family dressed to the nines, the portraits of James Van Der Zee remain some of the most beautiful, impactful, and important documentations of the Harlem Renaissance.

Born in Lennox, Massachusetts in 1886, Van Der Zee showed aptitude with cameras at a young age, and by his teen years, he was living in Harlem with his sister, honing his craft. He had his own studio in the '20s in his 20s. After making a solid living as a local photographer, he was "discovered" by the art world in the late 1960s when he was in his 80s and had a bit of a career renaissance until his death in 1983.

A new book by NYU Assistant Art History Professor Emilie Boone looks at the life and work of Van Der Zee, not just as the iconic fine arts figure he was, but also as a working photographer in a time and place of enormous change. It's called A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography. It's out now, and we have Emilie Boone with us today. Hi, Emilie.

Emilie Boone: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Let's start with the title of the book. When you refer to a nimble arc, how are you using the word nimble and how does it apply to the photography of Van Der Zee?

Emilie Boone: Yes, thank you so much for starting with that question. I love the word nimble. When we think about photography, we can think about nimble in terms of the technical know-how that photographers need to have when taking photographs. They need to have a set of skills, they need to be adaptable. That's partially how I'm using the word nimble in James Van Der Zee's great facility as a photographer.

I'm also using the word nimble to describe the approach I take in thinking about Van Der Zee. As you mentioned, oftentimes, we can think about him as a singular distinct photographer in a very fine art historical sense, but then at the end of the day, his photographs to a certain sense have a very quotidian value to them.

These are the photographs of everyday people, and photography was a medium that completely informed how people were representing themselves and seeing the world. I use nimble to describe the back and forth that I want my readers to think through, from the fine arts sense to also the quotidian everyday sense when it comes to Van Der Zee's photography.

Alison Stewart: You write that he can often become pigeonholed within a moment and a place as you write, as opposed to being understood as a Black artist with broad temporal material and spatial reach. How does thinking about Van Der Zee only within the confines of, say, the Harlem Renaissance or only within the confines of being a fine artist really limit our understanding of his work and his craft?

Emilie Boone: As you mentioned, Van Der Zee started his career or started his engagement with photography as a teenager and he is still taking photographs well into his 80s. We have decades and decades, multiple decades that go so much beyond maybe the 20-year period of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1910s to the 1930s, and a few years afterwards.

It's during this time of the Harlem Renaissance where he is really developing his craft and it overlaps with huge artistic and social movement within African American New York life and really nationally and internationally, but to only focus on that movement and on those two decades really overlooks a longer career where Van Der Zee was creating portraits, studio portraits, street scenes.

As I talk about in my book, he was also doing a lot of restoration work later in the '40s and '50s. Then we come to this moment in the 1960s where he is "rediscovered" and is the largest contributor to the Harlem on My Mind show at the Met. His photographs have another afterlife during the '60s and beyond. The book really tries to capture the larger arc of his photographs and the various meanings they take on as the years go on.

Alison Stewart: Part of his story is that he took pictures of people, everyday life, and people he describes as all looking good on Sunday. Who did he photograph and why did he photograph them?

Emilie Boone: Well, he photographed really anyone who came to his studio, and I think that's so important to emphasize, Van Der Zee wasn't going out and getting his subjects and asking people, "Can I take your photograph?" Van Der Zee had a storefront studio. He was advertising. There was a whole window display, and so people who were walking by his studio could look at his window and see exactly what kind of photographs he could take.

Those people who were walking by were the residents of Harlem during the various decades of his career. There were also those who were visiting Harlem. There were lots of people who were coming from other locations within the United States and even nationally, internationally, who were coming and visiting Harlem and then stopping by Van Der Zee's studio. We're talking people who are walking by, and then also, he had patrons that were institutions and organizations, so you can imagine church groups.

There were certain schools that hired him. Marcus Garvey's UNIA, he ended up documenting and taking photographs of the UNIA convention that happened in 1924. A real range of individuals and organizations. Within his subjects, we're also talking about well-known performers of the day, well-known politicians, and also many subjects that we don't know their names, and we might not ever know their names, but they stood before his camera and had their moment of representation and their moment of becoming.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting, it reminds me of a photographer in Washington, DC, Addison Scurlock, who had a similar studio where he took people's wedding photos and he took the Black debutante ball photos. I've always wondered, maybe you know this, and forgive me for putting you on the spot, I always wondered if these photographers knew they were capturing history. Did they know that they were capturing a picture of the future ambassador to X, Y, and Z, or were they just working people in the community who were also good artists?

Emilie Boone: I think that's a great question. I would probably say the latter. Van Der Zee, at the end of the day, he's running a business. This is a commercial photography studio. This is his bread and butter. This is how he's making a living. For him not only to be able to pursue this passion in photography and really add his own stylistic flair to a lot of these studio portraits, but at the same time, it was his job to appease his clients, these individuals that are walking into his studio.

As that is happening, the years are ticking by and history is being made, and he is able to capture so many transitions and changes that are happening in Harlem. We see that visually in the differences and shifts in the style of what people wanted when they sat before his camera. You also saw this in the style of dress. You see the different outfits as they were changing over the years. You also get to see families as they grow up.

One of my favorite things about going into the archive, Van Der Zee's archive, is seeing repeated visitors. A lot of times, sometimes these visitors would come in around Easter time and then maybe come around Christmas, but the real fascinating revisits were those who are really returning as they're having children, as they're getting older, and you really see a progression in the lives of Black individuals in Harlem. It's really fantastic.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the book, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography with Emilie Boone, associate professor of Art History at NYU. I love this first paragraph of your introduction. I'm going to read it quickly. "In 1926, James Augustus Joseph Vander Zee took a portrait of enduring consequence. A Black woman, formerly dressed, sits in a chair, flanked on one side by a tall man in a suit. On the other side, another woman stands, wearing a plaid dress. A plain black backdrop and a side table decorated with flowers centers the figures. Based on its composition alone, Family Portrait can be described as a handsome image, one that fits neatly within Van Der Zee's larger oeuvre of photographs from his Harlem studio business. Yet, through its reproduction and print, the image has been asked to do more than its sitters, Maddie, Estelle, and David Osterhout, could have ever imagined." What has this image been asked to do?

Emilie Boone: That image is probably one of the best-known of Van Der Zee. Part of the reason why it's well-known, it was reproduced in one of the most kind of iconic books, Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, the famous theorist of photography. He features Van Der Zee's photograph. In his book, he names Van der Zee. He discusses it to a very limited and reductive way, and it's this moment that a lot of scholars have returned to and corrected what Barthes has said.

For those interested, they can go and read the book. What's really interesting about this occasion is that it's an example of how Van Der Zee's photographs have been taken up and asked to do so many things over the years; whether it's as we discussed represent an iconic Harlem Renaissance figure, whether it's be that a very stereotypic representation of Black life during the '20s and '30s.

There are other instances within the book where photographs that are taken within one context are remade and meant to do a different kind of work. We see that specifically decades later in the Harlem logline show in 1969.

Alison Stewart: We have time for one quick call. Someone's called in, who has firsthand experience with Van Der Zee. Catherine, really quickly, tell us your story.

Catherine: My husband was an assistant commissioner for cultural affairs for a decade in the early '80s. We had the amazing privilege of being with Mr. Van Der Zee as he photographed Eubie Blake [unintelligible 00:12:23] few rooms of floor through probably above the gallery was on Madison Avenue. He had his traditional box camera. There was a baseball game going on in another room that seemed to be very important to both of the gentlemen. Mr. Blake, we finally called him, "Eubie, come on in."

That was Mr. Van Der Zee speaking, of course, and he sat him down. I'm sure you've discussed it already, but he exposed the shutter with a coffee can, and it was a Chock full o'Nut's can, and that's how he got the image. It was a peak for this New Yorker and my husband. It couldn't have been a more peak day in New York.

Alison Stewart: Catherine, thank you for calling in. You could read more about James Van Der Zee in Emilie Boone's book, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography. Emilie, thank you so much for making time today.

Emilie Boone: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Alison. It's been a pleasure.

 

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