The Harlem Book of the Dead

Photographer James Van Der Zee (1886 -1983) is perhaps best known for his artistic documentation of the Black middle class experience during and after the Harlem Renaissance.

In addition to everyday New Yorkers, his subjects included luminaries such as Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, poet Countee Cullen, and decades later, a young Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1919, Van Der Zee photographed the victory parade of the mostly-Black 369th Infantry Regiment, also known as the Harlem Hellfighters.

The master lensman also applied his famous care and attention to detail to funerary photos, in order to properly memorialize the dead. These included shots of his own daughter, Rachel, who had died from appendicitis at 15.

Van Der Zee's work was not unlike earlier Victorian death portraits, which had not been as popular in the United States. In 1978, Van Der Zee’s post-mortem photography was compiled into The Harlem Book of the Dead, with a foreword from the great Toni Morrison.