Curated by Colin Westerbeck

James VanDerZee’s seventy-five-year career as a portraitist in Harlem spanned most of the twentieth century and took in almost every African American of note, from Marcus Garvey to the literati of the Harlem Renaissance. But his bread and butter consisted mainly of walk-in clients of a less celebrated sort. Curator Colin Westerbeck, who recently left the Art Institute after a nearly twenty-year stint, has selected 105 prints—many borrowed from the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem—that put the focus on what he calls VanDerZee’s “everyday working methods as a storefront photographer.” In some cases, poses and backgrounds stay the same while the subjects change, hinting at the underlying codes that govern portraiture as a whole.

— Andy Grundberg