The Newspaper and Ubiquity: 1924 Photographs as Moving Objects of the African Diaspora

This chapter explores images taken by James Van Der Zee during the summer of 1924, when he served as the official photographer for Marcus Garvey, the Pan-African leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). It considers the format, arrangement, and circulation of Van Der Zee's UNIA images in international print media in order to illustrate the impact of the photographs' translation into print and thereby the impact of their mass reproduction. A different kind of photographic vision is animated specifically through Van Der Zee's photographs' reproduction in print, one in which a photographer's lack of control over how his photographs are viewed enables new ways of thinking beyond the photographic image accruing value through the intentional choices made by Van Der Zee alone.