During the 1920s and 1930s, VanDerZee enjoyed a reputation as Harlem's preeminent portrait photographer, catering to everyone from proud parents, shopkeepers, and newlyweds to such luminaries as Marcus Garvey, Bill Robinson, and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. VanDerZee's career spanned more than seventy years, but his work first achieved widespread recognition only in 1969, when it was included in the Metropolitan Museum's controversial exhibition, "Harlem on My Mind."
