CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/14/2025

A new facsimile edition of ‘The Harlem Book of the Dead’

For nearly fifty years, collectors have traded copies of the concise and perfect photography book, The Harlem Book of the Dead, produced in 1978 by artist and sculptor Camille Billops, scholar and poet Owen Dodson and photographer James Van Der Zee as an intuitive, collaborative documentation of Black funerary traditions in Harlem. This historic publication is now back in print in facsimile form from Primary Information, including Van Der Zee's photographs, Dodson's poems, Billops' interview with Van Der Zee, Toni Morrison’s original texts and a newly-commissioned afterword by Karla FC Holloway. “The Harlem Book of the Dead not only fully claimed twentieth-century Harlem as its origin story,” Morrison writes, “but also institutionalized that story. Billops selected and organized Dodson’s and Van Der Zee’s cooperative work and then framed it within a critical textual thread: her priceless conversational interview with Van Der Zee. Dodson’s poetry is a quieter accompaniment, notable as much for the visual space it claims in the composition of the book as for the way that his meticulous reading of the photographic subject is rendered into verse. James Van Der Zee’s extraordinary images are what finally locate this community and assign it the particularity of Harlem as the site of its creation—a decision that gave requisite and full acknowledgement to Black America’s most globally recognized homeplace. And, despite these artists’ collaboration, photography is its voice. And Der Zee is speaker for the dead.”