The Photograph

Probably we have all once held a faded photograph of a relative in our hands searching for likeness and history in the gaze of the person portrayed. The Curaçao-born director Sherman De Jesus begins his film with such a photo, the only picture he has of his grandfather. In search of the photograph’s origin, the filmmaker arrives at Harlem and discovers the former photo studio of James Van Der Zee. In the 1920s, the photographer was part of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, the artist movement that revived the New York neighborhood and put it on the map as the cultural center of Black America. Novelist Toni Morrison admired the narrative calibre and humanity of Van Der Zee’s work and Sherman De Jesus, too, uses this quality for his film. He treats the spectacular visual and musical material with dramaturgical intelligence and thus evokes the zeitgeist of the Harlem Renaissance with astonishing immediacy. The film tells stories about human creativity, about finding and asserting one’s identity, and about resistance; back then against the lynchings, segregation, and the denial of perspectives for one’s future, today against persisting racism and the sell-out of a quarter which is so much more than just a place to live, be it for its old-established residents or for the community of newcomers. Sherman De Jesus, just like Van Der Zee, is a gifted storyteller; with only a small piece of personal history in his luggage, he embarks on a captivating journey back into the future.