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

Smalls (art history and theory, Univ. of Maryland) has prepared this book with a 16-page section of 60 badly reproduced images. Laid out from one to four per page, they consist of 36 photographs and four scrapbook pages by Van Vechten. The remaining images are by other, more contemporary photographers. Van Vechten's homoerotic photographs seem to be drawn from no more than a half dozen or so photographic sessions occurring "sometime during the 1930s and 1940s." The aesthetic qualities of these photographs are spare. They are conceptually mundane, poorly seen, and poorly executed. Smalls has surrounded this unprepossessing portfolio with 198 pages of thoroughly researched, densely written text, thus providing a useful addition to libraries focused on gender and/or black studies. Specialist audience. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Graduate students through professionals. W. S. Johnson Monroe Community College

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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved