James Van Der Zee, Owen Dodson & Camille Billops: The Harlem Book of the Dead

Primary Information, 2025 edition, softcover, 91 pages, 27 x 23 cm 

THE HARLEM BOOK OF THE DEAD with it's photographs, poems and text are more than representational reflections of mourning rites. They reveal the history of a time in Harlem, now past, when society cared for both the living and the dead, the belief that we must preserve a standard of pride representing order high in spiritual and temporal values. There is a purging of sorrow in the very pageantry of funerals. Carelessness about death might reflect a carelessness about life.

The examples in ritual as presented in this volume are as universal as death - and there are Harlems everywhere.