The Harlem Renaissance was echoed in Berkshire County. For nearly eight decades, Lenox native James Van Der Zee photographed the people of Harlem, including such 1920s luminaries as Du Bois, Aaron Douglass, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, and Zora Neale Hurston. Van Der Zee was the second person in Lenox to own a camera, a gift from his mother's employer when he was in fifth grade. He took hundreds of pictures of family and friends that he learned to develop himself. Although he wanted a career in music, he found that photography was more financially rewarding, so he left Lenox for Harlem to set up a studio. He became nationally known through the famous 1969 exhibit at New York Metropolitan Museum, "Harlem on My Mind." A number of his early photographs taken in Berkshire County can be viewed in the Stockbridge Library Historical Collection.