The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten : Public Face, Private Thoughts
Editorial Reviews Book Description 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 theater 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.
Author 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 transracial 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 candor and reverence, offering a rare glimpse into the private domain of the master photographer and his handsome subjects. From the Publisher The private, interracial, homoerotic photographs of one of the best-known gay, white promoters of the Harlem Renaissance 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 University Press,1592133053,Criticism,Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General,Gay Studies,Gay men, Black,Gay men, White,General,New York,New York (State),Photo Techniques,Photography,Photography, Erotic,Portraits,Sociology,Subjects & Themes - Portraits,Social Science / Gay Studies
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