Artist+1.

In 1923 a young African-American couple dressed in their Sunday best stepped into a small photography studio on Harlem's 135th Street. Inside, an eager black man with wide-set eyes took a long look at them. He smiled and seemed to watch how they smiled back. As he guided them toward the back room, he asked them where they were from, where they lived, how long they'd been married. He sat them before a fireplace painted on the wall, then went to a closet, pulled out a fur, and draped it on the woman's shoulders. He glanced at the man's arm and tucked in a fraying edge of sleeve. He circled them slowly, adjusted the lights, then went to his camera. What he saw when he looked through the lens was the Harlem he loved. During the glory days of the 1920s, hundreds of Harlem's finest made the trip to James Van Der Zee's studio for similar treatment. There, Van Der Zee took picture after picture, making sure that each one presented Harlem in the best light. In the process, he crafted a dazzling record of middle-class black life, a side of America rarely seen at the time. Van Der Zee himself grew up in a world as privileged as the one his subjects inhabited. His parents, former servants of President Ulysses S. Grant, settled in Lenox, Massachusetts, a summer haven for New England's wealthy that was home to only half a dozen black families. There Van Der Zee was raised on a steady diet of music and art. In 1906, at the age of 20, he moved to Harlem and started the five-piece Harlem Orchestra. The group had some success, but to eat, he returned to another childhood talent — photography. In fifth grade, Van Der Zee had become the second person in Lenox to own a camera. He had taken hundreds of pictures of his family and others and developed them all himself. So in 1914, he signed on as a darkroom technician in a department store. At times he would fill in behind the camera, and within three years, he had the courage and the reputation to open his own studio. He called it "Guarantee Photo." [|http:/w/ww2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=4796]
 * HARLEM'S FINEST FACE**