The Met will acquire some 14,000 prints and 23,000 negatives from Donna Van Der Zee, the photographer’s widow, and the James Van Der Zee Institute, which was established to safeguard his legacy but has been dormant since the 1980s.
The Met’s conservation department encountered this problem previously with the first photographic archive it acquired, of Walker Evans, in 1994. In 2008, the museum also took possession of the archive of Diane Arbus.
Rosenheim would not disclose the sum the Met paid her for the prints and negatives, except to say it was “a really nice amount of money.” The Met also obtained the copyright for reproduction of Van Der Zee’s images.
Operating out of a studio at 272 Lenox Avenue , Van Der Zee, who died in 1983, provided portraits in which Harlem residents commemorated their momentous life passages: first communion, military service, marriage.
Demonstrating his range and achievement, a selection of about 40 photographs is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington through May 30, 2022, drawn from their permanent collection.
Now that the Van Der Zee prints and negatives are gathered together, the Met and the Studio Museum will invite scholars to study them.
Along with researching the backgrounds of Van Der Zee’s subjects, the custodians of the archive intend to investigate his techniques.
With the studio portraits, he liked to alter the backdrops by changing the set, either replacing the décor in a sitting room or inserting a new surrounding by combining two negatives.
Born to parents who had worked as domestic servants in the White House of Ulysses Grant, Van Der Zee grew up in Lenox, Mass., where along with buying a camera and teaching himself to use it, he demonstrated a precocious musical talent.
“His very particular vision has the power to be inspirational to generations of artists who have seen the possibility of what it means to chronicle in time and place a people and a culture,” Golden said.