The dreamlike portraits of the departed by James Van Der Zee

You could tell he was going back to work when the drinking stopped and the partying stopped. He would sit in uneasy silence—he hated to be alone, but he was always lonely spiritually—he would place a sheet of yellow lined paper on his clipboard, and begin to write down with his strong, courtly hand a world that would honor his imagination and his dead.

The dead were always with Owen, Owen Dodson, the poet, theater director, and professor at Howard University, who was the first person to direct James Baldwin’s first play, The Amen Corner, in 1955. (Howard’s theater department didn’t want to do it because Baldwin’s characters spoke “black English” at a time when the mid-Atlantic was the goal, but Dodson did it anyway.)

That was long before I met Dodson, in the early 1970s, when I was fourteen. We were introduced by a woman he had known since grade school, in Brooklyn, who was now a teacher working with my mother and who, like my mother, believed I had a future as a writer. Shortly afterward, Dodson invited me to his house to pick up some books he wanted to give away for free; Eventually, our relationship changed, and my regular donor became my complex mentor. I spent a lot of time after school in his beautifully furnished apartment on West Fifty-First Street and learned a lot there. I saw things I had hitherto only seen in books or in my imagination: Cocteau’s beautiful drawings, Victorian sofas, freestanding candlesticks taken straight from a 19th-century play. Dodson also had an extensive collection of art and photography books, including a first edition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, and a book by and about a photographer I had never heard of, a man with a Dutch-sounding name: James van der Zee.

“Van der Zee Men, Lenox, Massachusetts,“ 1908.

The book The World of James Van Der Zee, published in 1969 and which included a large number of van der Zee’s photographs of black Americans in the early twentieth century, fascinated me as much as the Matisse collage on the cover of the Cartier-Bresson volume. Van Der Zee’s cover photo showed four well-dressed black men practicing derby. Three of them were wearing ties, while the fourth, an older man with an impressive gray moustache, was wearing a tie and a jacket, with a pocket watch tucked into it. I didn’t feel like these guys were dressing up for the camera; Rather, they were showing the beauty of everyday formalities. The picture was colourful, dark, but even through that fabric, I could see the ease the men felt when they were together – an ease I had never felt before.

I wanted to know everything about these guys. (I didn’t find out until later that it was a portrait of Van der Zee, his brothers, and their father.) With drawing and drawing, you first want to know something about the artist; With photography, the subject is seduction. The best photographers frame their photos with a kind of astonishing modesty: Look at this! What Van der Zee wanted us to see in that picture, and in all of his pictures that I saw at the time, was how the amazing and the familiar could coexist in one frame, and how interested he was in all of that, even the dead.