"Harlem on his mind" by Jaimie Hubbard from the National Post, May 1, 1999. Critics are rediscovering the work of James VanDerZee and finally giving him credit for his alternative views, artistic vision, and technological sophistication. The best photography is a subtle mix of art and social commentary. Take the work of James VanDerZee. He was a photographer, acclaimed now in art circles, but with nowhere near the profile of his contemporaries Cecil Beaton say, or Alfred Eisenstaedt. Which is a shame, because VanDerZee was as important in his own milieu as his more famous colleagues were in theirs. VanDerZee took photographs that recorded his community, Harlem, in the 1920 and 1930s. Documenting the rise of a black middle class during Harlem's renaissance alone would have catapulted him to the forefront of American photographers. And for many years, that's what VanDerZee was: a social documentarian. But a revival of his work by both academics and collectors over the past 20 years has shown the black photographer to be much more than that; his work encapsulated an artistic vision - and a technological sophistication - that went far beyond what anyone else was doing in photography at that time, beyond what anyone might have expected from someone who had no formal artistic training and who had dropped out of school at age 14. Now, an exhibition of VanDerZee's work opens this weekend at the Wedge Gallery in Toronto and will, for the first time, allow Canadian audiences to see VanDerZee's work first-hand. "Harlem's renaissance was an extremely important period in black history in America, a whole cultural period, and VanDerZee documented it," says Maia Sutnik, head of collections and photography curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. "Opportunities were very, very limited for black photographers of that era, [so] VanDerZee stands out as a key figure. In that regard, his work is social. But that doesn't mean it is devoid of artistic merit. He definitely had a coherent vision, so his work is more than archival." Unfortunately, VanDerZee sank into obscurity for at least two decades following the Second World War. And that, wrote Deborah Willis-Braithwaite in a book on VanDerZee, published by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., meant his work "was not known to the generations of photographers that came of age after the 194O's, for whom it might have made a difference. His secure, middle-class upbringing gave him an invaluable perspective on African-American life and culture, enabling him to make photographs that were removed from what came to be, by the depression, the predominant and accepted way of depicting the African-American experience in photographs." Adds Sutnik: "His work has deep context, but the context is meaningless unless you have a consummate artist who can convey his vision to an audience. VanDerZee's is enormously compelling material." That's one of the reasons Wedge Gallery owner Ken Montague was eager to mount this show. Montague saw his first VanDerZee in l969 when New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art included the photographer's work in a retrospective called Harlem on my Mind. "I couldn't have been more than six or seven," Montague says, "and yet those images have stuck with me." Montague contacted VanDerZee's widow, Donna Mussenden VanDerZee, last fall about arranging a Canadian exhibit. At first, he says, she was suspicious. "She's very concerned about who acquires the images and for what purposes they intend to use them." But Montague's enthusiasm for the work -and his desire not only to expose them to a wider audience, but to showcase the breadth and depth of the African-American experience - convinced her. "He was doing reauy unusual work, especially for the time," Montague says, "like painting on images, photomontages, scratching negatives -things that weren't done in commercial photography again until the 1980's." VanDerZee was born in 1886 in Lenox, Mass., a wealthy colony of summer homes for New York's elite. His parents were servants in those homes, and were able to provide comfortably for their six children. It was at school in Lenox that James VanDerZee got his first camera, a prize for selling 20 packets of ladies' sachet powder. The camera, unfortunately, didn't work, but VanDerZee was hooked. He saved money from various odd jobs, and soon bought a mail-order camera. In 1905, at age 19, VanDerZee moved to NewYork. After a series of false starts, and a variety of different jobs - from waiter to teacher - he eventually opened a photography studio in Harlem. From the First World War until the mid-l940's, VanDerZee prospered; even during the Depression, some Harlemites had money and flocked to his studio. He bought his own building and had a thriving portrait photography business. "There's a certain amount of unabashed romanticism in his work," says the AGO's Sutnik. That's particularly evident in his studio work: He would pose his subjects in dramatic tableaux carefully created to reflect both their growing affluence and their dignity. One compelling image made in 1932 shows a raccoon-coat-wearing couple posing by their new Cadillac. Another striking photograph, Nude (1923), shows a young woman gazing pensively into a fireplace. Writes Wdlis-Braithwaite: "That her skin glows in the warm light of the fire is a tribute to VanDerZee's subtle control of studio lighting, for the fireplace, with its cheery blaze, is nothing more than a backdrop." He was also able to manipulate symbols in his pictures, creating photomontages that would feature, for example, the image of a dead girl floating over her coffin. It was a remarkable - and highly popular - feat for some-one technicallv untrained. But VanDerZee was not restricted to his studio; he recorded Harlem street life, and its parades and marches. "VanDerZee's photographs are about the connection between self and family and community," Willis-Braithwaite says. This was a far cry from his contemporaries - or indeed, later generations of photographers - who emphasized the other side of the black experience: the alienation and dislocation. After the Second World War, and with the growing popularity of people taking their own pictures, VanDerZee's business began declining. His type of pictures -formal portraits, mise en scene - became unpopular and by the mid-1960s he was destitute. It was only a serendipitous encounter with a young photographer researching a show to be mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that saved VanDerZee and his work from obscurity. VanDerZee's pictures became the core of Harlcm on my Mind in 1969. "It was like stumbling across a gold mine," said the young photographer, Reginald McGhee, of his chance encounter with VanDerZee. Harlem on my Mind resulted in something of a renaissance for VanDerZee and before his death in 1988, he was back shooting portraits, among them such luminaries as comedian Bill Cosby and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Nineteen of VanDerZee's images will be on display at the Wedge Gallery show. The photographs are 8x10 modern prints (which means they have been reprinted using modern techniques and paper) and will sell for $850 (US). "I want people to be able to buy these," says Montague. "There are vintage prints available [prints made by VanDerZee himself], but they are rare and would be prohibitively expensive. A vintage VanDerZee is exactly what the AGO's Sutnik is after, though. We don't have VanDerZees in our collection: she says, adding, "I would certainly love to have some!"