Albert Vecerka’s “Harlem Brownstones” (2000) dominates the new “hrlm:pictures” show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. A tightly cropped C-print, 48 inches by 96 inches, its wide expanse shows nine classic New York City brownstones, six of them boarded up.The shadows cast by the late afternoon sun emphasize the wonderful architectural details but smack of mortality like those in an Edward Hopper painting.

A single car sits at the curb to the right. You can make out the sign for “Stamina Plus Juices” over a closed basement shop. A few pedestrians hurry along on their way to places elsewhere. The regular patterning of the windows and the modulations of the red color in buildings that have or have not been painted makes for an arresting image, but the windows boarded with plywood ask the question that dominates the show: How did this come to be?

The question called to mind Jervis Anderson’s elegiac book, “This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-50,” which when I read it filled me with nostalgia for a place I never knew. By the time “This Was Harlem” was published in the early 1980s, Harlem was just a notorious slum: the great music long gone, the literary and artistic experimentation hardly a memory, great swaths of once-elegant brownstones pulled down and replaced by the regimented slabs of public housing projects. But Harlem, like the rest of New York, is too dumb to stay dead.

Mr. Vecerka’s mural-size varicolored embrace of urban decay contrasts with the four black-and-white, modestly sized pictures by James VanDerZee (1886-1983) that are the exhibition’s spiritual starting place. In addition to these four, there are another 11 by VanDerZee in “Reclaiming Beautiful,” an exhibition in an adjoining room that showcases pictures teenagers took in response to VanDerZee’s work, as part of a program sponsored by the museum.

VanDerZee, over a very long and productive career, left us the best visual record we have of Jervis Anderson’s Harlem. A studio photographer who took pictures of people who paid to be photographed, he went to social occasions to memorialize events and organizations, and shot both residential and commercial interiors. He also moved his view camera along the streets and avenues of Harlem shooting individual storefronts and, sometimes, whole blocks. His work is Harlem’s cultural kitchen midden.

VanDerZee was the great rhapsodist of black American aspirationalism. The sweet young boy in “Untitled (Boy Sitting)” (1926) perches on the seat of a chair wearing an Eton suit and a shirt with lace at the cuffs and collar. The living room in “Interior of Home” (1931) is furnished with sturdy period pieces and decorated with bits of chinoiserie. “Lenox Lounge” (undated) is a paean to chrome and tile with cozy round banquettes whose plump benches are covered in stylish vinyl.

“Metropolitan Woman’s Club” (1940s) is a vivacious tableau: On the left of some sort of stage, a middle-aged woman sits wearing a white dress and a black sash. A younger woman stands next to her wearing a man’s formal black tie and tails with a snappy weskit. To the right, a woman in a print dress draws away from the camera fast enough for her image to have blurred.

Something is going on among these three that amuses them and the few spectators watching them, and whatever it is, they thought it was important enough to have the ubiquitous VanDerZee come with his camera and record it. I don’t know which is the more important social datum about all of these pictures: that the subjects are black or that they are middle-class Americans.

VanDerZee did not condescend to his subjects, maybe because he knew how much their clothes and furniture and cars and dignity had cost them in terms of arduous work and psychic determination, or maybe because they were paying customers who had to be pleased. He engaged them in their social aspirations, granted them their accomplishments. In VanDerZee’s pictures there is never any adulation or respect for anything that is not fine. He could do this because he was a very talented photographer, and because he too was a striver, one of them. Harlem is fortunate he lived as long as he did.

Jervis Anderson’s socially cohesive Harlem is also represented in nine pictures by Aaron Siskind, then a Photo League street photographer who shot there in the Depression. “Lady in Kitchen,” “Apollo Theatre,” and “Wishing Tree” (all 1937), from “Harlem Document,” are examples of a sensitive outsider’s efforts to present the community to a wider audience. “Facade, Unoccupied Buildings,” is an eerie forecast of Mr. Vecerka’s “Harlem Brownstones.”

There is only one picture by the great Life photojournalist Gordon Parks, “Fontenelle Children Outside Their Harlem Tenement” (1968), but it captures the shift in the area’s fortunes in the postwar period, as ragged children play in the rubble in the narrow space between two buildings. The new atmosphere is also in the eight portraits by Dawoud Bey (all 1979). “Harlem, U.S.A. (Rear View of Woman Wearing a Hat)” suggests VanDerZee’s era, but the woman is looking away. The other pictures are more about survival than upward mobility. Mr. Bey was only 26 when he took these pictures, but they are free of cant, and hint at the imaginative, complex portraitist he was in the process of becoming.

Harlem, the real estate section assures us, has been reborn. Again. Many young photographers in the “hrlm” exhibition express renewed affection and curiosity. Donald Andrew Agarrat’s “Biker Gyrlz” (2003) is a digital print of two girls on their motorcycles, one purple, one pink, with outfits to match. Brooke Jacobs’s “Harlem Bait & Tackle, Harlem, N.Y.” (2000), reflects the photographer’s study of the modern black-and-white cityscape tradition. Katherin Schminder’s color print “African American Day Parade September 12th 2004 Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard/128th Street” shows a woman in bright African gear holding a child dressed in red, isolated against a white sidewalk and the long black shadows of other passers-by.

You can see Harlem from the upper deck of one of the Gray Line Tour buses patrolling 125th Street, or you can visit “hrlm” at the Studio Museum.

Until October 23 (144 W. 125th Street, between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, 212-864-4500).