James Van Der Zee’s Dreamlike Images of the Departed

You could tell that he was getting back to work when the drinking stopped and the parties stopped. Sitting in uneasy silence—he hated being alone, but, spiritually, he was always alone—he’d put a pad of lined yellow paper on his clipboard and, in his strong, decorous hand, he’d start jotting down a world that honored his imagination, and his dead.

The dead were always with Owen—Owen Dodson, poet, theatre-maker, and onetime Howard University professor, who was the first person to direct James Baldwin’s first play, “The Amen Corner,” in 1955. (The theatre department at Howard didn’t want to do it because Baldwin’s characters spoke “Black English” at a time when mid-Atlantic was the goal, but Dodson did it anyway.)

That was long before I met Dodson, in the early nineteen-seventies, when I was fourteen. We were introduced by a woman he’d known since elementary school, in Brooklyn—now a schoolteacher who worked with my mother and who, like my mother, believed that I had a future as a writer. Soon after that, Dodson invited me over to his place to pick up some books he wanted to give away; eventually, our relationship changed, and my casual benefactor became my complicated mentor. I spent a great deal of time after school in his beautifully furnished apartment on West Fifty-first Street and learned so much there. I saw things I had hitherto seen only in books or in my imagination: beautiful Cocteau drawings, Victorian sofas, free-standing candelabras straight out of a nineteenth-century play. Dodson also had an extensive collection of art and photography books, including a first edition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment,” and a book by and about a photographer I’d never heard of before, a man with a Dutch-sounding name: James Van Der Zee.

Titled “The World of James Van Derzee,” the book, which was published in 1969 and included a sizable number of Van Der Zee’s photographs of Black Americans in the early twentieth century, had a cover that fascinated me as much as the image of a Matisse collage on the cover of the Cartier-Bresson volume did. Van Der Zee’s cover photo showed four elegantly dressed Black men sporting derbys. Three of them wore bow ties, while the fourth, an older gentlemen with an impressive gray mustache, had on a necktie and a vest, with a pocket watch tucked into it. I didn’t get the feeling that these men had dressed up for the camera; rather, they were showing the beauty of everyday formality. The picture was tinted, sepia-colored, but, even through that scrim, I could see the ease the men felt at being together—an ease that I had never felt.

I wanted to know everything about those men. (I didn’t discover until later that it was a portrait of Van Der Zee, his brothers, and their father.) With painting and drawing, you first want to know something about the artist; with photography, the subject is the lure. The best photographers frame their images with a kind of amazed humility: Look at this! And what Van Der Zee wanted us to see in that photograph, and in all his photographs that I saw then, was how the spectacular and the commonplace could exist in a single frame, and how interested he was in all of it, even the dead.