"James Augustus Joseph Vanderzee"(June 29,1886-May 15 1983)

Photographer and entrepreneur,was born in Lenox, Massachusetts,the second of six children of

John VanderZee and Susan Elizabeth Egberts.Part of a working-class African American community that provided services to wealthy summer residents,the VanDerZees (sometimes written Van Der Zee or Van DerZee)and their large extended family operated a laundry and bakery and worked at local luxury hotels,James played the violin and piano and enjoyed a bucolic childhood riding bicycles,swimming,skiing, and ice fishing with his siblings and cousins.He received his first camera from a mail order catalogue just before his fourteenth birthday and taught himself how to take and develop photographs using his family as subjects.He left school that same year and began work as a hotel waiter.In 1905 he and his brother Walter moved to New York City.James was working as an elevator operator when he met a seamstress,Kate Brown.They married when Kate became pregnant,and a daughter, Rachel,was born in 1907.A year later a son, Emile,was born but died within a year.(Rachel died of peritonitis in 1927.)In addition to a series of services jobs,James worked sporadically as a musician.In 1911 he landed his first photography- related at a portrait studio located in the largest department store in Newark,New Jersey.He was hired as a darkroom assistant, he quickly advanced to photographer when patrons began asking for "the colored fellow."The following year his sister Jennie invited him to set up a small studio in the Toussaint Conservatory of Art, a school she had established in her Harlem brownstone. Convinced that he could make a living as a photographer, James wanted to open his own studio, but Kate was opposed to the venture,This fundamental disagreement contributed to the couple's divorce in 1917.He found a better companion and collaborator in Gaynella Greenlee, a woman of German and Spanish descent who, after marrying James in 1917, claimed to be a light-skinned African American.That same year the couple opened the Guarantee Photo Studio,later the GGG Photo Studio, on West 135th street,next door to the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library.This was the first of four studio sites James would rent over the next twenty five years.With his inventive window displays and strong word of mouth within the burgeoning African American community,James quickly established himself as Harlem's preeminent photographer.By the early 1920s he had developed a distinct style of portrait photography that emphasized narrative, mood, and the uniqueness of each image. Harlem's African American citizens-couples,families,-coworkers, and even family pets-had their portraits taken by James.With a nod to Victorian photographers,he employed a range of props,including fashionable clothes and exotic costumes,and elaborate backdrops(many of which he painted himself) featuring landscapes or architectural elements."I posed everyone according to their type and personality and therefore almost every picture was different"James made every sitter look and feel like a celebrity,even mimicking popular media images on occasion.In James photographs,sitters appear sophisticated,urbane,and self-aware, and Harlem emerges as a prosperous,healthy, and diverse community, Another characteristic of his portrait work was his creative manipulation of prints and negatives,which included retouching,double printing,and hand painting images.In addition to improving sitters'imperfections, retouching and hand painting added dramatic and narrative details,like tinted roses or a wisp of smoke rising from an abandoned cigarette.He often employed double printing-at times using as many as three or four negatives to make a print-to introduce theatrical storytelling elements into his portraits.Such attention to detail was commercial venture and that making his patrons happy and his images one of a kind helped business.He regularly took on trade work,creating calendars and advertisements and, in later years,photographing autopsies for insurance companies and identification cards for taxi drivers.But portraits, of both the living and the the dead,were his bread and butter.Funerary photography, a practice begun in the nineteenth century and popular in some communities through the mid-twentieth century, was a major part of his business.His daily visits to funeral parlors culminated in book Harlem Book of the Dead (1978).Harlemites of every background hired James to document their weddings,baptisms,graduations,and businesses with portraits and on site-photographs.Organizations as diverse as the Monte Carlo Sporting Club,Les Modernes Bridge Club,the New York Black Yankees,the Renaissance Big Five basketball team, Madame C.J. Walker's Beauty Salon,the Dark Tower Literary Salon, and the Black Cross Nurses commissioned his portraits.Today these photographs serve as an invaluable and unique visual record of African American life during Harlem's heyday.In the 1920s and 1930s and into the 1940s James photographed the African American leaders living and working in Harlem,including the entertainment and literary luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance Bill "Bojangles"Robinson,Jelly Roll Morton,and Countee Cullen;the box legends Jack Johnson and Joe Louis;and the political,business, and religious leaders Adam Clayton Powell Sr.and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.,A'lelia Walker,Father Divine,and Daddy Grace.