The New Yorker:

A collaborative work by a photographer, a poet, and an artist, “The Harlem Book of the Dead,” newly reissued, tells stories through funerary portraits.

By Hilton Als

You could tell that he was getting back to work when the drinking stopped and the parties stopped. Sitting in uneasy silence—he hated being alone, but, spiritually, he was always alone—he’d put a pad of lined yellow paper on his clipboard and, in his strong, decorous hand, he’d start jotting down a world that honored his imagination, and his dead.
The dead were always with Owen—Owen Dodson, poet, theatre-maker, and onetime Howard University professor, who was the first person to direct James Baldwin’s first play, “The Amen Corner,” in 1955. (The theatre department at Howard didn’t want to do it because Baldwin’s characters spoke “Black English” at a time when mid-Atlantic was the goal, but Dodson did it anyway.)

That was long before I met Dodson, in the early nineteen-seventies, when I was fourteen. We were introduced by a woman he’d known since elementary school, in Brooklyn—now a schoolteacher who worked with my mother and who, like my mother, believed that I had a future as a writer. Soon after that, Dodson invited me over to his place to pick up some books he wanted to give away; eventually, our relationship changed, and my casual benefactor became my complicated mentor. I spent a great deal of time after school in his beautifully furnished apartment on West Fifty-first Street and learned so much there. I saw things I had hitherto seen only in books or in my imagination: beautiful Cocteau drawings, Victorian sofas, free-standing candelabras straight out of a nineteenth-century play. Dodson also had an extensive collection of art and photography books, including a first edition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment,” and a book by and about a photographer I’d never heard of before, a man with a Dutch-sounding name: James Van Der Zee.

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