Initial Broadcast Date: January 18, 1972
30 minutes – Color
This program profiles 85-year-old photographer James Van DerZee, who has spent most of his life in Harlem documenting the black experience.
Black Journal will also feature a performance by famed blues singer-guitarist John Lee Hooker.
Black children used to call Van DerZee the “picture-taking man.” In Harlem he photographed the celebrities of his day – Marcus Garvey, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Jack Johnson, and Adam Clayton Powell Sr. – and the events of daily life. He captured black beauty in the faces of Harlem children, black pride in the eyes of Marcus Garvey, and black dignity in the poise of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell. His work spanned six decades of black history.
He began his career at the age of 12 in Lenox, Massachusetts, when he answered a magazine ad that promised a camera to anyone who sold 20 packages of perfume. In 1915 he went to Newark as a darkroom worker for a photographer, from whom he learned more of the trade. He then moved to New York and set up business in Harlem.
In 1967 young black photographer Reginald McGhee (who appears on the Black Journal program) discovered Van DerZee while researching for the exhibition “Harlem on my Mind,” to which Van DerZee was the main contributor. McGhee also edited a collection of his works, “The World of James Van DerZee,” published by Grove Press. Recently Van DerZee was forced out of his home by a city marshal in a mortgage foreclosure – leaving countless prints behind. He now lives in a one-room apartment. The Ford Foundation has supplied $25,000 for cataloging his works.
For Van DerZee life appears “one dream after another.” There are times you feel you are just rushing before a mighty tidal wave that’s pressing you on towards a distant mountain, he says. “When you’ve reached the top there’ll be nothing to do but look around and view each setting sun, the coming destiny.”
For Black people his life has meant a unique record of the Black experience. Perhaps James Van DerZee at age 85 has fulfilled his destiny – to have documented the fact that “Black Has Always Been Beautiful.”
“Black Journal” is a production of NET Division, Educational Broadcasting Corporation
Executive producer: Tony Brown
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