James Van Der Zee - Harlem's eyes
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Today marks the anniversary of the death of Harlem's most prolific photographer, James Van Der Zee (June 29, 1886 - May 15, 1983). His portrait (above) was shot by by Irving Penn.
I had the good fortune to meet him during the 1970's, and to know many Harlem families who have his photos in a place of honor in their homes. He captured the Harlem that many outsiders never saw or understood.
It is hard for me to write about photography - I'd rather have you just look at some of his work.
Enjoy.
A visual history of Harlem through the eyes of a genius photographer, Mr. James Van Der Zee. Music by another musical genius, Mr. Duke Ellington (Harlem Nocturne)
(
Marcus Garvey)
(Harlem Moorish Zionist Temple)
(Couple on the Town - 1939)
(Black Aphrodite)
The Harlem Renaissance Photographer
Born in 1886 in Lenox, Massachusetts, Van Der Zee moved to Harlem in 1905 and made himself known through his work, including some of the most famous photographs ever taken.
The one thing that marks Van Der Zee's work as special was that the subject matter was not special. His photographs depicted every day Harlem life through various portraits of celebrities, families, weddings, funerals and other special events. A quote in the book Harlem Renaissance Art of Black America sums up his work perfectly: ‘In a remarkable photographic career, he captured the life and spirit of Harlem and its people during the two world wars, the literary and artistic Renaissance, the hard times of the depression, and the glorious era of swing.’ His photography pushed back racial and gender boundaries in many ways during the era.
By placing blacks in traditional settings he challenged racial stereotypes and, as the official photographer of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), he managed to show a very different side of black life to that usually projected by white misconceptions and the consequent imposition of stereotypes. Van Der Zee’s favorite subjects were women, thus he altered gender boundaries and attempted to counter stereotypes in his work.
Books on Van Der Zee:
The James Vanderzee Studio
From 1916 until 1969, James VanDerZee operated a portrait studio at various addresses in Harlem. In his heyday, from the 20s to the 40s, he took pictures of prominent Harlem figures like Marcus Garvey, the preacher Daddy Grace and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. But in the latter part of his career, he spent more of his time on a mail-order business re-touching and restoring other people's old photographs.
The same year that he closed his last location, however, his work was featured in the exhibition Harlem on My Mind at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although the exhibition was controversial, the attention that it attracted to Van Der Zee's work finally brought the photographer, at age 83, the acclaim he deserved. This intimate catalogue recalls the environment in which Van Der Zee worked and lived. While he did make portraits of local celebrities, including the stars of the many legitimate theaters open in Harlem before the war, his real bread-and-butter were clients from the community's thriving middle class. Despite laboring under related commercial constraints, Van Der Zee pursued his work with imagination and verve, photographing his clients before elaborate backdrops or sets, making complex group portraits of Elks' lodge members, jazz bands, and ladies' clubs in their own settings.
VanDerZee: Photographer, 1886-1983
The career of the African-American photographer James VanDerZee spanned 80 years, from his turn-of-the-century photographs of family and friends in Lenox, Massachusetts, to his late portraits, made when he was in his nineties, of Bill Cosby, Eubie Blake and Jean-Michel Basquiat. VanDerZee is best remembered as the eyes of the Harlem Renaissance, and this book reproduces some of the thousands of photographs he took between the wars in New York's Harlem, where he ran the leading commercial photographic studio. They include portraits of celebrities and community leaders; children and families; weddings and parties; documentary photographs; and photographs of nudes or whimsical subjects for calendars and posters. This study includes many of VanDerZee's best-known images, and essays discussing his life and work.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The bid-rigging trial of politician Bobby Ferguson's has opened an old wound for the Eastern District of Michigan: Why aren't there more African Americans in the jury pool? Detroit Free Press: Bobby Ferguson trial: Controversy over lack of black jurors resurfaces.
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The issue came up in Ferguson's case this week when an African-American Detroiter got bounced from the jury because she had two tattoos and refused to look at the prosecutor.
That outraged the defense. The three defendants are African American. The companies in the case are black-owned. And the alleged crimes occurred in Detroit, a predominantly black city.
Yet, out of the 116 potential jurors called for duty, only eight were African American -- about 7%. One -- possibly two -- made it on the final panel.
So much for a jury of your peers, argued defense lawyers, noting that African Americans account for 21% of the U.S. District Court's Eastern District of Michigan.
"This is a recurring issue," said defense attorney Anthony Chambers. "The Eastern District of Michigan has a history of having a problem with getting African Americans in the jury pool, and it's a systematic problem that needs to be solved."
A recent Free Press report highlighted the federal court's ongoing struggle with racial disparities in jury pools. Court officials acknowledged that there is a problem and said they are trying to fix it -- for example, by sending more questionnaires to ZIP codes in areas with high minority populations.
Sherry Willis was one of the eight African Americans called out of 116 potential jurors for the Bobby Ferguson trial. She was dismissed because of her tattoos and for refusing to look at a prosecutor. / PATRICIA BECK/Detroit Free Press
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Unfortunately natural riches in under developed countries very rarely benefit the poor. Yahoo: Gold! Haiti hopes ore find will spur mining boom.
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Its capital is blighted with earthquake rubble. Its countryside is shorn of trees, chopped down for fuel. And yet, Haiti's land may hold the key to relieving centuries of poverty, disaster and disease: There is gold hidden in its hills — and silver and copper, too.
A flurry of exploratory drilling in the past year has found precious metals worth potentially $20 billion deep below the tropical ridges in the country's northeastern mountains. Now, a mining company is drilling around the clock to determine how to get those metals out.
In neighboring Dominican Republic, workers are poised to start mining the other side of this seam later this year in one of the world's largest gold deposits: 23 million ounces worth about $40 billion.
The Haitian government's annual budget is $1 billion, more than half provided by foreign assistance. The largest single source of foreign investment, $2 billion, came from Haitians working abroad last year. A windfall of locally produced wealth could pay for roads, schools, clean water and sewage systems for the nation's 10 million people, most of whom live on as little as $1.25 a day.
"If the mining companies are honest and if Haiti has a good government, then here is a way for this country to move forward," said Bureau of Mines Director Dieuseul Anglade.
In a parking lot outside Anglade's marble-floored office, more than 100 families have been living in tents since the earthquake. "The gold in the mountains belongs to the people of Haiti," he said, gesturing out his window. "And they need it."
Haiti's geological vulnerability is also its promise. Massive tectonic plates squeeze the island with horrifying consequences, but deep cracks between them form convenient veins for gold, silver and copper pushed up from the hot innards of the planet. Prospectors from California to Chile know earthquake faults often have, quite literally, a golden lining.
Until now, few Haitians have known about this buried treasure. Mining camps are unmarked, and the work is being done miles up dirt roads near remote villages, on the opposite side of the country from the capital. But U.S. and Canadian investors have spent more than $30 million in recent years on everything from exploratory drilling to camps for workers, new roads, offices and laboratory studies of samples. Actual mining could be under way in five years.
In this April 10, 2012 photo, Genove Valcimon, 70, poses for a picture as he works on a road being built through the mountains to lead to an exploratory drill site in the department of Trou Du Nord, Haiti. (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)
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Just though this was kind of cool. The Root: NBA Player's Son Is a Top Hockey Prospect.
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Popeye Jones played for seven teams during 11 seasons in the NBA, being a good teammate, doing the dirty work and soaking up knowledge –- which helped him land an assistant coach gig with the Brooklyn Nets. But his three sons didn’t carry on his lifelong love affair. They’re all accomplished hockey players, especially 17-year-old Seth Jones, who very well might be the top overall pick in the 2013 NHL draft.
Jones has been the youngest player on the U.S. Men’s National Under-18 Team the last two years, helping them to consecutive gold medals in the world championships, most recently last month. His size, skills and instincts placed him among the nation’s most sought-after college recruits, a 205-pound silky-smooth skater standing 6-foot-3.
But Jones decided to take a different route to an eventual pro career, opting to join the Western Hockey League instead of an NCAA program. According to the College Hockey Blog, Jones is “one of the rare prospects that the college game will be worse off for not getting a chance to experience, but also one of the rare prospects whom you can’t blame for making the decision he did, even as biased as we college fans can be.”
Most folks probably assumed Jones would the target of college basketball coaches, but he chose hockey as a grade-schooler in Denver when his dad played for the Nuggets. Instead of playing right away, Jones took skating lessons for a year, and soon set his sights on playing for the U.S. National Team Development Program.
“Since I was 12 years old, I wanted to play for the NTDP,” he told USA Hockey magazine. Once the invitation was extended is “probably when I really decided I could maybe make a career out of it,” said.
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I want to write a "Breaking: water is wet" snarky intro but I won't, as a study find "Finds Race Still at Issue in 2012 Campaign" (Also cool the study has a link to a Daily Kos diary) Maynard Institute: Obama vs. "Automatic White Preference"
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"After the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, many proclaimed that the country had entered a post-racial era in which race was no longer an issue," Molly McElroy wrote this week for the University of Washington. "However, a new large-scale study shows that racial attitudes have already played a substantial role in 2012, during the Republican primaries. They may play an even larger role in this year's presidential election."
"The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington, shows that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favored whites over blacks — either consciously or unconsciously — also favored Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama.
" 'People were saying that with Obama's election race became a dead issue, but that's not at all the case,' said lead investigator Anthony Greenwald, a UW psychology professor."
Greenwald appeared Friday on NPR's "Science Friday" segment of "Talk of the Nation."
"The study's findings mean that many white and non-white voters, even those who don't believe they tend to favor whites over blacks, might vote against Obama because of his race. These voters could cite the economy or other reasons, but a contributing cause could nevertheless be their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes.
" 'Our findings may indicate that many of those who expressed egalitarian attitudes by voting for Obama in 2008 and credited themselves with having 'one the right thing' then are now letting other considerations prevail,' said collaborator Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University.
"In the study, a majority of white eligible voters showed a pattern labeled 'automatic white preference' on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias. Previous studies indicate that close to 75 percent of white Americans show this implicit bias."
In background material for the news release [PDF], Greenwald wrote, "These findings do not at all call for a conclusion that politically conservative candidates are racist. It does mean, however, that — for whatever reason — politically conservative candidates are more attractive to voters with White-favoring racial attitudes.
"The obvious questions raised by these observations: After nearly four years having an African American President in the White House, why do race attitudes (including unconscious race attitudes) continue to role in electoral politics?
"One possible answer is that, as President, Barack Obama is now more powerful than he was as candidate Barack Obama in 2008. This increased power and status may have brought out race-based antagonism that had less reason for being activated in 2008. Another possible answer is connected to Republican candidates' frequent assertions that their most important objective is to remove Barack Obama from the presidency. . . ."
Obama lost the white vote to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in 2008, 55 percent to 43 percent, but in exit polls dating to 1972, Democrats have never carried a majority of the white vote, Alan Fram reported in 2008 for the Associated Press.
Referring to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the putative Republican presidential candidate, "electionate" wrote in April for the Daily Kos, "If the non-white vote supports Obama to the extent it did in 2008, Romney will need to compensate by holding Obama to 38% of the white vote.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Statesmen and Generals consulted the Greek Oracles for advice great and small. Only Statesmen and Generals could afford the high fees the Oracles expected. The Oracles of Delphi, who were always women, retreated into a cave on the slopes of Mount Parnassus to speak with the gods through a small portal hollowed out of the cave wall; so as to divine the future and the advice they would give to Statesmen and Generals.
Some Geologists and Archaeologists surmise that the frenzied state the Delphic Oracle Pythia was said to be possessed of, when she uttered the divine hexameters said to be directly from Apollo, was caused by a dilution of hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide, that seeped through the rocks of the cave.
Researchers of Classical Greek Literature counter that Pythia spoke not in a frenzied state, but intelligently and in her own voice.
Those who could not afford the Oracle of Delphi though, relied upon...
Omens
Her eyelids were painted blue.
When she closed her eyes the sea
rolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots,
leaving behind silence above & below
a thousand years old. He stood beneath
a high arched window, gazing out
at fishing boats beyond the dikes, their nets
unfurled, their offshore gestures
a dance of living in bluish entourage.
He was only the court’s chief jester.
What he said & did made them laugh,
but lately what he sometimes thought he knew
could cost him his polished tongue & royal wig.
He was the masked fool unmasking the emperor.
Forget the revelation. Forget the briny sea.
He had seen the ravishing empress naked
in a forbidden pose. Her blue eye shadow.
Aquamarine shells crusted with wormy mud.
Anyway, if he said half of what was foretold,
the great one would become a weeping boy
slumped beneath the Pillars of Hercules.
-- Yusef Komunyakaa
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Welcome to the Front Porch
Front Porch Music - Old School Birthday Party for Melle Mel, born Melvin Glover, May 15, 1961