African Past or American Present?: The Visual Eloquence of James VanDerZee’s Identical Twins

This article proposes multiple and sometimes contradictory iconographical analyses of a 1924 portrait photograph by Harlem photographer James VanDerZee in order to demonstrate how VanDerZee and his sitters engaged in what Henry Louis Gates calls Signifyin(g). This layered and polyvocal photograph communicates a rich sense of African American identity between the two World Wars: simultaneously modern, modernist, Africanizing, and participating in the creation of a so-called "usable past" for black people in the United States.