The Harlem Book of the Dead. With a Foreword by Toni Morrison.

£250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Book of funerary photographs by the renowned photographer James Van Der Zee who is best-known for documenting the “Harlem Renaissance” with his stylised portraits, using unique retouching techniques and staging which echoed Victorian and Edwardian traditions. His funerary photos of the people of Harlem are accompanied here with writing by Camille Billops and poetry by Owen Dodson. Toni Morrison provided a foreword to the book and a story behind one of the photographs in the collection was influence for Morrison’s novel Jazz (1992). A near fine copy, a little browning and rubbing to the extremities.

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