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

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

James Smalls, . . Temple Univ., $35 (198pp) ISBN 978-1-59213-305-5

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)