The homoerotic photography of Carl Van Vechten : public face, private thoughts

J. Smalls

Carl van Vechten (1880-1964) gave up his career as a writer to become a full-time amateur photographer of celebrated African Americans. Apart from this well-known work, he also took many fotographs of black and brown male nudes. This private, homoerotic interracial collection was sealed in an archive until recently. This book in which 60 duotones are included, discusses these images in the context of primitivism's relationship to modernism, camp sensibility and theatricality, white privilege and exotic tourism, the vibrancy of underground gay culture during periods of political oppression, and the politics of spectatorship.