Photography Of James Van Der Zee

James Van Der Zee was a self-taught African American photographer of the 20th century. He photographed the lives of African American predominately in Harlem where his first photo studio opened in 1916. Currently his photography collection is available at The Met and many of his phots can be viewed on their website. My project has changed multiple times through the process of creating it but I settled on a timeline of some of James Van Der Zee’s photographs. The first step I took to creating my timeline was scraping the website. I scraped the Met website on the page featuring James Van Der Zee’s photos and converted it to a JSON file. Next I used Sublime text editor to import the JSON file. I did a “loop.” through the data and did a print statements for the four items I wanted out of the date which were image, title, date, and medium. The loop and print statement worked but it was giving me all the items in the data even the ones that didn’t have images. The Met Museum has place holders on their website to inform patrons that the item is there but is not viewable.