“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” — Marcus Garvey
When my grandfather passed in 2021, soon after my grandmother, there was something bitter and sweet about rifling through all that they had left behind. I am a lover of old things, and here was a lifetime of old belongings: typewriters, watches, telephones, records, a Rolodex, weather clocks, calendars, vintage cookbooks, houseplants older than me, and most abundant of all, photographs.
I had never seen so many photo albums—enough to fill an entire closet. I couldn’t bring myself to look at them yet, and not only because it would mean facing all over again who in them had gone. Above the photo albums, on the highest, dustiest shelf in the closet, was a beautiful collection of film cameras. I had held it together until then, but this was my breaking point.
I have loved photography, film specifically, since growing up in the dark room of my mother’s art department. At the age of twelve, my mom—artist and art professor, Stefanie Jackson—had taken me with her to teach in Italy. While there, I borrowed a Nikon FM2 and sat in on darkroom classes. I loved the cameras and the process of making a photograph, the tangible medium of film, almost more than the images themselves.
Standing there in my grandparents’ house, staring at my grandfather’s collection of film cameras, I simply could not believe that we had shared this love of film photography yet had never spoken about it with one another. Despite owning such an impressive collection of film cameras and a beautiful film projector, my grandfather, Harvey B. Jackson, was not the professional photographer in my family. As it turns out, much of the film ephemera originated with his grandfather—my great-great-grandfather, Harvey C. Jackson.
Harvey Cook Jackson, Sr. was the first African American to own a photo studio in Detroit. The studio opened in 1915, just down the street from his home on Beaubien Street. Jackson was an active member of Detroit’s African American community, capturing friends, family, neighbors, schoolchildren, church congregations, and the overall daily life of his community from the 1910s to the 1940s and beyond. Subsequent generations of Jackson men would each demonstrate an interest in photography, explaining the vast collection of vintage cameras, expired film, flashbulbs, and projectors inherited and used by my grandpa.
In 2021, The Met jointly established the James Van Der Zee Archive with The Studio Museum in Harlem and Mrs. Donna Van Der Zee. Van Der Zee’s former photo studio in Harlem is around the corner from where I live now; in fact, its current tenants are my landlords. I walk by it almost every day, knowing that had I been here one hundred years earlier, I would have been looking at his photos through the window as I passed. I also learned I had family who immigrated from Trinidad to Harlem in the time Van Der Zee’s studio would have been operating at its peak during the Harlem Renaissance.
After learning of the James Van Der Zee Archive, I immediately thought of my great-great-grandfather. I began to find so many connections to his photographs. While Jackson seemed to be working about a decade earlier than Van Der Zee, both were turn-of-the-century Black photographers in burgeoning Black metropolises—and by the rules of northern de facto segregation, had primarily Black populations to photograph.
Black public life was an important subject for these photographers. James Van Der Zee captured the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks in one of many street parades, a central aspect of life in 1920s Harlem. Jackson also took pride in photographing his community, and I couldn't help but see a parallel in his group portrait of congregants of the Second Baptist Church of Detroit, over which Jackson creatively inset a portrait of Reverend Robert L. Bradby. The Second Baptist Church is the oldest religious institution owned by Black people in the midwest and served as the last stop on the Underground Railroad before Canada from 1836 to 1865. Jackson was distantly related to its “conductor,” George DeBaptiste.
Listening to Thelma Golden and Jeff Rosenheim discuss Van Der Zee’s practice, the artistry and care he put into photographing his community, I recalled Jackson’s penchant for photographing his own family, friends, and community. Stepping inside from the large-scale public photography on the streets, interiority and the family were central to depicting Black metropolitan life. Just as Van Der Zee captured the diversity of Black life in 1920s and 1930s Harlem, Jackson was the first to capture Black life in Detroit as one not defined by poverty or lack. If Black life during the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance could be filled with struggle, it could also be filled with joy and love and gratitude for one’s family.
I am still somewhat heartbroken that most of the people in my family who personally knew Harvey C. Jackson, Sr. and could speak about him have already passed. There remain many photos he took that are still to be digitized, and many sitters we may never know the names and identities of. Throughout the process of this research, however, I have already uncovered so many forgotten memories. I have learned that Harvey C. Jackson’s sister, Cora Belle Jackson, was the first Black person to graduate from the University of Chicago in 1896. A relative unearthed a collection of photographs after I happened upon an article on her in The University of Chicago Magazine. I discovered not only did I share this connection with my great-great-grandfather through film photography; I am also connected to my third great-aunt in that I, too, attended and graduated from the University of Chicago—124 years after Cora did it first.
When I think of Jackson and Van Der Zee’s original purposes for these photos, often as personal mementos of family and loved ones, I wonder what it means now to display them as a part of public collections. Several of Harvey C. Jackson’s photographs are now available at the Detroit Public Library and the Detroit Institute of Arts, though many of the dates and names of the subjects have been lost. With Van Der Zee, too, in many cases we do not know who these people are, only that they had a moment or occasion that they wanted to remember. What does it mean then to share these personal histories? To make one’s family photo album art? How odd and surprising it might be, to chance upon a part of your own history on museum walls.
When objects are removed from their original contexts, presented in a museum or preserved in an archive, there is always a chance that they might lose something of their personal histories. There are countless details, memories, and lives pictured only in fragments here, the whole of which may never be recovered. However, the process of researching my great-great-grandfather’s past, in parallel with James Van Der Zee, led to the excavation of a personal history I never expected to uncover. These photos have allowed me to connect with my family, past and present, and I know now that there are still many more connections to be made. The photos we leave behind only tell a fraction of the story.
Marquee: Harvey Cook Jackson (American, 1876–1957). Man and woman holding newborn sitting on front porch, c. 1930s. 1 photographic print; 8 x 10 in. © Detroit Public Library