Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will digitize negatives from the archive of Harlem-based photographer James Van Der Zee (1886–1983). The museum will engage a digitization consultant to scan and digitize 20,000 stable negatives over a two-year period. Project activities will include processing negatives in batches according to material type with progress tracked quarterly. The project will facilitate the museum’s efforts to share Van Der Zee’s archive—much of which has never been seen publicly—online via the museum’s website, which reaches more than 37.8 million users around the world annually. The availability of this work will offer scholars and the public a more comprehensive account of the history of American photography while simultaneously celebrating Black American culture from the first decade of the 20th century to the early 1980s.