Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.