How did a Canadian dentist become one of the most important collectors of photography in North America? The story begins with one picture. Specifically, a James Van Der Zee picture of a young couple dressed in raccoon fur coats and posing with their Cadillac V-16 Roadster in Harlem. Everything is gleaming. It’s the ultimate aspirational image.
But this picture was taken 1932, the era of racial segregation in America. Slavery had been abolished 67 years previously but anti-black racism, including lynching, was rife, and rural southerners flocked to northern cities to escape it. Harlem, New York, was in the throes of its renaissance, as Black culture from jazz to literature flourished. The unnamed couple in the photograph, solemn and proud, embody that movement’s gumption, what Tina M Campt has called the ability of Black artists to “twin pain, trauma, loss, with Black people’s virtuosity in survival, and the capacity to inhabit tremendous joy in spite of all these things.”
