Abstract
<jats:p>Chapter 1 focuses on the collaboration of famed Harlem, New York, studio photographer James Van Der Zee and Pan-African leader Marcus Garvey, who as head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (unia), hired Van Der Zee to document the organization’s activities in the summer of 1924. This collaboration reveals the importance that Garvey and the unia placed on photography to both document and confer consistency and legitimacy on Garvey and the movement amid organizational tumult. Through Van Der Zee, Garvey and the unia employed photographic portraiture to mobilize racial feeling and to assert a vision of a masculinist Black modernity rooted in an imagined Africa and routed through the authority of the camera and the promises of portraiture.</jats:p>