His busiest and most fruitful day was Sunday because, as he once said, “the high class, the middle class, the poorer class all looked good on Sunday,” though it is fair to say that his greatest achievements were his depictions of those whose accomplishments and aspirations were not too distant from the newly prosperous, ambitious, and self-aware African American middle class.īorn and raised in the tiny resort community of Lenox, Massachusetts in the Berkshire Mountains, VanDerZee had his first camera by the time he was a teenager, though his family was generally arts-friendly and he was also given extensive instruction in the piano and the violin ultimately he sat in sometimes with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. At the height of his career in the 1920s and 1930s, he might have had three to four portrait sittings every day. He had a fraught relationship to street photography and worked predominantly out of his studio. James VanDerZee (1886-1983) produced somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 photographs in his creative lifetime, maybe even more, almost all of them of African Americans who lived in or were passing through Harlem.
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