While James Van Der Zee is widely known and praised for his studio portraits from the Harlem Renaissance era, much of the diversity and expansive reach of his work has been overlooked. From the major role his studio played for decades photographing ordinary people and events in the Harlem community to the inclusion of his photographs in the landmark Harlem on My Mind exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, Van Der Zee was a foundational Black photographer whose work illustrates the shifting ways photography serves as a constitutive force within Black life. In A Nimble Arc, Emilie Boone considers Van Der Zee’s photographic work over the course of the twentieth century, showing how it foregrounded aspects of Black daily life in the United States and in the larger African diaspora. Boone argues that Van Der Zee’s work exists at the crossroads of art and the vernacular, challenging the distinction between canonical art photographs and the kind of output common to commercial photography studios. Boone’s account recasts our understanding not only of this celebrated figure but of photography within the arc of quotidian Black life.

Emilie Boone is Assistant Professor of Art History at New York University.

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction. To Pivot Lightly: Adding the Vernacular to Art History’s Sight Line  1
1. “More, Many More”: Van Der Zee’s World of Harlem Renaissance Studio Photographers  29
2. The Newspaper and Ubiquity: 1924 Photographs as Moving Objects of the African Diaspora  71
3. A Reframing of Value: Van Der Zee’s Restoration Work of the 1940s and Beyond  113
4. Black Quotidian Experiences: Revisiting the Met’s Harlem on My Mind Exhibition of 1969  153
Coda. To Nimbly Rewind: Fixing a New Constellation of Ideas circa 1994  199
Notes  213
Bibliography  241
Index  259