The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts [Hardcover]

James Smalls (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 28, 2006

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was perhaps the most notorious white patron of the arts of black America, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1932, he gave up a career as a theatre critic and a novelist of light fiction to become a full-time amateur photographer. His photographs of the era's celebrated African American cultural figures are well-known, but until recently his private, homoerotic interracial photographs were sealed in an archive. James Smalls considers how these images relate to Van Vechten's public persona and private desires. He discusses the interracial photographs in the context of white privilege and exotic tourism, primitivism's relation to modernism, camp sensibility and theatricality, and the vibrancy of underground gay visual culture during periods of political oppression. He also considers contemporary viewers' conflicting responses to the eroticized black male body in Van Vechten's and later twentieth-century photography. This original and provocative book embraces trans-racial voyeuristic pleasure, while acknowledging the negative political implications of that pleasure. Amply illustrated with 60 pioneering duotones, "The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten" celebrates the sensual nude male form with both candour and reverence, offering a rare glimpse into the private domain of the master photographer and his handsome subjects.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. If readers know Carl Van Vechten's name today, it is probably as a minor character in Ann Douglas's 1995 A Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. A white supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, Van Vechten was a portrait photographer as well as the author of popular novels and criticism, and is very much worthy of rediscovery today. The departure point for this incisive volume is a series of nude, interracial, homoerotic photographs that Van Vechten took in the 1930s and '40s (unsealed by Yale's Beinecke archives in 1989). In contextualizing them, Small explores the complex interplay of race, sexuality and masculinity in 20th-century art and culture, including the history of nude male photography, from the late 19th century work of Thomas Eakins to the more recent career of Robert Mapplethorpe. A professor of art history at the University of Maryland, Small examines the racial and sexual underpinnings of modernism, the impact of urban geography and the strong influence of gay male sensibility on U.S. culture. Drawing on a wide range of primary and critical sources, he not only uncovers a vital link in American cultural history but makes an important contribution to understanding contemporary culture. 60 b&w photos. (June)
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Review

"Smalls goes to great lengths to ensure that Van Vechten's photos are viewed as artifacts of their time-the 1930s and 1940s-and photographed by someone intimately familiar with the art movements of primitivism and modernism. Smalls analyzes some of the images with amazing detail." The Dallas Voice "[Smalls'] sexuality, his race, and his training are all filters for his astute assessment of the 34 homoerotic photos - many of them of black men, and just as many interracial - collected here. [His] honest tension informs, animates, and illuminates this landmark academic study." Q Syndicate "The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten contains 60 photographs along with a learned but highly accessible discussion of the photographer and his place as an artist and as a gay man. Scholarship has rarely been this stimulating." Out magazine "Drawing on a wide range of primary and critical sources, [Smalls] not only uncovers a vital link in American cultural history but makes an important contribution to understanding contemporary culture." Publishers Weekly "James Smalls offers an original, provocative, thoughtful and necessary analysis of interracial homoerotic fetish and fantasy. His writing is well balanced and his argument considers how the images operate psychologically and socially during the historical moment of the Harlem Renaissance and during the present day. The book is an invaluable text in black studies, queer studies, and the Harlem Renaissance." Mark A. Reid, author of Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now "The book confirms the erotic curiosity inherent in Van Vechten's Harlem sponsorship and the voyeurism--obverse to the spectatorship of his criticism--that informed so much of his life." Bookforum Spring 2007 "thoroughly researched...it provides a useful addition to libraries focused on gender and/or black studies." Choice "Smalls shines a new light onto an understudied portion of Van Vechten's impressive cache of male nude photographs sealed in boxes at Yale's Bienecke Library for twenty-five years after his death. Taken in the 1930s and 1940s often pairing one black and one white model, they are expertly analysed sic in all their transgressive as well as racist potential...With deft turns of phrase and analytical prowess, Smalls hold onto seemingly binary, contradictory points of view...With perceptive comparisons to the work of more recent black photographers such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Ajamu Ikwe Tyekimba, Smalls tracks compelling trajectories in twentieth-century, interracial, homoerotic photography. His important book will surely inform much new work in the field." American Studies

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Temple University Press (May 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592133053
• ISBN-13: 978-1592133055
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,351,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strong Effort, June 6, 2008

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Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (Hardcover)

After reading Clive Fisher's race-baiting, slash and burn all out attack on this book in the pages of Bookforum, I sought it out the way one might visit a famous crime scene like Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

That review was an absurd piece of special pleading that contended that Dr. Smalls should not have separated out the all-white sex photos Van Vechten took, and that to concentrate on the interracial photographs represented a betrayal of Van Vechten's intentions. It was an outrageous leap in logic delivered with all the bile that Clive Fisher could assume which is plenty, he is absolutely cutting when he wants to be. To what end? So you don't like a book, you don't complain in BOOKFORUM about an author's misspellings when one's own book is notorious for its misreadings and twisted sentences as garish as they are misleading. Anyhow I read Smalls' work and I found it an admirable addition to the all too short bookshelf of serious writing about Van Vechten's perplexing work.

Okay sometimes he seems to be arguing both sides of the fence, that's the thing I noticed, that on the one hand Van Vechten's work is indeed racist since it exploits the black male body for the gratification of a white viewer (and his circle of friends with whom he swapped prints), but he defends it to the degree that he argues its racism isn't as severe as it has been made out to be. He doesn't rise to the essentialist depths of the critic Hazel Carby, but he suggests gently that perhaps Carby's position is a bit on the "black and white" side, if I may coin a pun. Wonder what her response would be to this pioneering work. The photos themselves are eye openers, and I would have to say that Hugh Laing must really have been up for anything, including being dragged by the ankles around the floor of Van Vechten's studio in a transparent sort of Hefty bag, and surely the splinters must have been intense, both in that photo and the alfresco one in which he is hung upside down from the limb of a little tree. Smalls provides an array of photos from black photographers of our own day, who seem to be strangely attuned to Van Vechten's own brand of secret ceremonial, most valuably he provides fresh introductions to Lyle Ashton Harris, Ajamu Tove Tyelumba, and Rotini Fani-Kayode, and lets the reader make up his own, or her own, mind about the nature of influence and the ownership status conferred by the lens slash gaze.

4 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, January 22, 2007

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Stuffed Animal "Stuff" (Kansas City, Missouri United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (Hardcover)

As a photographer, Carl Van Vechten was no great shakes. The author seems to realize this, and pads the somewhat thin photo selection with works by Mappelthorpe and others. The book's text is dull and uninteresting.