James Van Der Zee




The Expanding the Walls eight-month photography-based program uses the work of renowned photographer James Van Der Zee (1886–1983) as a catalyst for discussion and art-making. 
The work of James Van Der Zee is central to the Expanding the Walls curriculum and culminating exhibition. Van Der Zee is one of the most celebrated photographers of the Harlem Renaissance—with a career that spanned over seventy years—and is a master of the constructed image, photographing his subjects in the way they aspired to be seen. 

In 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Mrs. Donna Van Der Zee jointly established the James Van Der Zee Archive at The Met, a landmark collaborative initiative to research, conserve, and provide full public access to the remarkable catalogue of photographs by James Van Der Zee. The James Van Der Zee Archive is the third archive of an American photographer to be acquired by The Met, and its first collaboration with a partner institution to safeguard the legacy of an individual artist.

Over the next several years, The Met will be working in partnership with the Studio Museum and Mrs. Van Der Zee, and alongside a diverse team of historians, curators, registrars, and conservators, to fully research, archive, catalogue, conserve, and digitize the entire archive to make it fully available to the public.

Some of the photographs shown below come from the James Van Der Zee Archive. They, along with other Van Der Zee works in the Studio Museum's collection, were selected by the Expanding the Walls participants and demonstrate the breadth of Van Der Zee's practice.
James Van Der Zee
Street Scene with Runners, 1930
Gelatin silver print
5 × 7 in. 
Studio Museum in Harlem; 
gift of The Sandor Family Collection, ChicagoJames Van Der Zee
Interior of Home, 1931
Gelatin silver print
8 × 10 in.
Frame: 13 1/2 × 15 1/4 × 1 1/2 in. 
Studio Museum in Harlem; 
gift of The Sandor Family Collection, ChicagoJames Van Der Zee
View from the G.G.G. Studio, 1954
Gelatin silver print
10 × 8 in.
Frame: 14 1/2 × 11 1/2 × 1 1/2 in.
Studio Museum in Harlem; 
gift of The Sandor Family Collection, ChicagoJames Van Der Zee
Your Face Looks Honest, c. 1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
8 1/4 × 3 1/2 in. 
Frame: 14 3/4 × 11 1/2 × 11/16 in. 
Studio Museum in Harlem; 
gift of Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection