James Van Der Zee

B 1886 Lenox, Massachusetts, USA

D 1983 Washington, D.C., USA

Over fifty people crowd into the corner of a room. The group is carefully organized around a just-
baptized child, Maria Warma Mercado, held in a woman’s lap at the center of both the image and the
occasion. Moments before, the atmosphere must have been festive, given the party hats, decorative
streamers, and banjo, but as the photographer readied the camera a quiet solemnity descended on
the participants, who adopt the stillness required for the long exposure time of a glass-plate negative.
As tightly squeezed as they are, a few partygoers don’t make it into the frame—only a detached
forearm or a fragmented shoulder hovering on an edge of the image reveals their presence.
Given the family name of the child and the array of ethnicities in the crowd, this photograph
was probably taken in a private home in East Harlem, which in the 1920s was a racially diverse
neighborhood of African Americans and immigrants and their descendants from the Caribbean,
South America, and China. The photographer, James Van Der Zee, recorded fellow residents of
Harlem from 1912, when he opened a commercial portrait studio there, through 1969, when he
was evicted from his apartment and moved to another part of the city. In addition to portraits,
Van Der Zee’s clients hired him to document major life events, from baptisms to weddings to funerals.
His studio photographs are often highly stylized, reinterpreting the historical portrait tradition for
the modern age through the creative use of props, costumes, and gestures. He also used developing-
process techniques such as combination printing and retouching, allowing his clients to include
symbols of their desires and hopes: a newlywed couple may be accompanied by the faint image
of a future child, for example, or a body in a casket by images of angels or even Christ.
From the 1920s on, Van Der Zee also accepted many commissions for photographs outside
his studio, shooting in both private and public spaces. The resulting images, such as that of
Maria Warma Mercado’s baptismal party, eschew the imaginative additions of his studio work.
If Van Der Zee’s studio pictures provide a cross-section of Harlem’s middle and upper classes, his
out-of-studio commissions present a broader community, at church gatherings, school ceremonies,
local businesses, meetings of all sorts, and political events such as the parades, rallies, and drills
organized by Marcus Garvey. At a time in the United States when mainstream images of black
Americans were often minstrel caricatures and grotesqueries that supported systemic racism,
Van Der Zee captured ordinary scenes of black life in Harlem, collaborating with his subjects
to photograph them in what he described as “a position that showed them to the most advantage.”
Sitters knew that they would have a hand in controlling their own representation, and that trust
allowed Van Der Zee to run a successful studio business for most of his life, creating a vast
photographic archive of thousands of images that constitute a comprehensive group portrait
of Harlem during the first half of the twentieth century.

Kristen Gaylord
Baptism Celebration to Maria Warma Mercado
1927
Gelatin silver print
7 5/8 × 9 1/2 in. (19.4 × 24.1 cm)
Acquired through the generosity
of Harriette and Noel Levine. 1994

438 439
James Van Der Zee
B 1886 Lenox, Massachusetts, USA
D 1983 Washington, D.C., USA

Over fifty people crowd into the corner of a room. The group is carefully organized around a just-
baptized child, Maria Warma Mercado, held in a woman’s lap at the center of both the image and the
occasion. Moments before, the atmosphere must have been festive, given the party hats, decorative
streamers, and banjo, but as the photographer readied the camera a quiet solemnity descended on
the participants, who adopt the stillness required for the long exposure time of a glass-plate negative.
As tightly squeezed as they are, a few partygoers don’t make it into the frame—only a detached
forearm or a fragmented shoulder hovering on an edge of the image reveals their presence.
Given the family name of the child and the array of ethnicities in the crowd, this photograph
was probably taken in a private home in East Harlem, which in the 1920s was a racially diverse
neighborhood of African Americans and immigrants and their descendants from the Caribbean,
South America, and China. The photographer, James Van Der Zee, recorded fellow residents of
Harlem from 1912, when he opened a commercial portrait studio there, through 1969, when he
was evicted from his apartment and moved to another part of the city. In addition to portraits,
Van Der Zee’s clients hired him to document major life events, from baptisms to weddings to funerals.
His studio photographs are often highly stylized, reinterpreting the historical portrait tradition for
the modern age through the creative use of props, costumes, and gestures. He also used developing-
process techniques such as combination printing and retouching, allowing his clients to include
symbols of their desires and hopes: a newlywed couple may be accompanied by the faint image
of a future child, for example, or a body in a casket by images of angels or even Christ.
From the 1920s on, Van Der Zee also accepted many commissions for photographs outside
his studio, shooting in both private and public spaces. The resulting images, such as that of
Maria Warma Mercado’s baptismal party, eschew the imaginative additions of his studio work.
If Van Der Zee’s studio pictures provide a cross-section of Harlem’s middle and upper classes, his
out-of-studio commissions present a broader community, at church gatherings, school ceremonies,
local businesses, meetings of all sorts, and political events such as the parades, rallies, and drills
organized by Marcus Garvey. At a time in the United States when mainstream images of black
Americans were often minstrel caricatures and grotesqueries that supported systemic racism,
Van Der Zee captured ordinary scenes of black life in Harlem, collaborating with his subjects
to photograph them in what he described as “a position that showed them to the most advantage.”
Sitters knew that they would have a hand in controlling their own representation, and that trust
allowed Van Der Zee to run a successful studio business for most of his life, creating a vast
photographic archive of thousands of images that constitute a comprehensive group portrait
of Harlem during the first half of the twentieth century.

Kristen Gaylord
Baptism Celebration to Maria Warma Mercado
1927
Gelatin silver print
7 5/8 × 9 1/2 in. (19.4 × 24.1 cm)
Acquired through the generosity
of Harriette and Noel Levine. 1994

438 439