Black Men and Interracial Homoeroticism in the Photography of Carl Van Vechten

James Smalls

Smalls:  I’m going to talk about Carl Van Vechten today.  I don’t know if you all know who Carl Van Vechten is.  Many of you do, I’m sure, and there are those that don’t.  It actually begins in 1932 and that, of course, was a period when the economy wasn’t too good in the States, and everyone was suffering from devastating economic hardship, but Carl Van Vechten, and there is a self-portrait of Carl Van Vechten there on the left, he decided all of a sudden to give up a very lucrative career as a theater critic and as a novelist of light fiction, his fiction was quite popular even though it’s very superficial and fluff, which is typical of Carl Van Vechten, but he was very successful.  He gave that up and became a full-time amateur photographer instead.  He was introduced to the possibilities of photography through a friend of his, a noted characteristic, his name is Negal Corvarubias (??) who had actually just returned from a trip abroad and brought back with him a lica camera.  Van Vechten tried this out and wasted no time in buying one for himself, and it was at that particular moment that he actually decided to give serious consideration to photography as an art form.

Younger:  Had he made a lot of money when he quit his job?

Smalls:  He also had an inheritance from his brother who left him a million.  He was independently wealthy but he was making good money as a writer and a critic.

 

Smalls:  Carl Van Vechten.  He’s from Iowa, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Van Vechten I guess is  Dutch ancestry.  Actually, I think he was here in 1906 at Columbia.  Anyway, several years prior to introducing Van Vechten to this new camera technology, Corvarubias (??) satirized Van Vechten’s notorious obsession with African-Americans and African American-culture in a 1926 caricature titled A Prediction.  Here is one of those showing Carl Van Vechten as black; as having Negro features, and there on the left again, a caricature of Carl Van Vechten as a black man.  At the same time that all this happened, Vanity Fair actually wrote in one of their pieces that Carl Van Vechten was in fact getting a heavy tan.  That’s how they described it, because he had such an obsession with African-Americans and African-American culture, that they derisively said that about him.  In a review of Carl Van Vechten’s notoriously salacious novel called Nigger Heaven, which was also published in 1926, this was a very popular, but at the same time, it caused a lot of controversy and got him in a lot of trouble.  In fact, I call it Nigger Heaven Hell for Van Vechten.  Anyway, that’s a whole other story.  In a review of that novel which appeared in 1926, the playwright Avery Hopwood went so far as to jokingly alert readers to the possibility that Van Vechten was an imposter and not white at all.  In a letter that was addressed directly to Van Vechten, Hopwood stated, “I’m explaining that you really see little of Harlem these days, but that you saw a great deal of it before you passed.”  That means passed as black, as opposed to passed as black.  To pass as black; he’s making a joke there.  “They are all surprised to hear about your Negro strain but I tell them that your best friends always knew.”  So what Hopwood was hinting at about Van Vechten’s indulgence in African-American culture is what has been called race change.  Basically, that has to do with the traversing of race boundaries, racial imitation or impersonation, cross-racial mimicry or mutability, white posing as black or black passing as white, pan racial mutuality.  I’m quoting that.  That’s basically what it’s about, and Van Vechten indulged in that cross-racial, inter-racial divide on many levels as we’ll see on an erotic level as well as other levels.  This phenomena that’s going on here with Carl Van Vechten is actually a very important moment in American modernism because it’s a moment that unveils and questions inter-racial contacts and cross-cultural mixings during this particular period, and the dynamics of these cross-racial and cross-cultural currents are, in fact, very volatile.  They’re ongoing.  They’re incomplete, and identity itself cannot be denied, can not be ignored, can not be oversimplified.  In other words, we’re dealing with something very, very complex here in terms of the phenomena.  Now as his private photography is going to suggest, the traversing here of sexual and racial boundaries operated as a theatrical metaphor for Van Vechten who, in his social life, consciously played multiple roles through which he projected himself as one, an average preserver of art and culture, as an artist as well, as a patron, a very important patron for African-Americans, but also as a victim and as a savior of black America.  He projected himself as that in his public life, but then we’ll see in his private life that also becomes evident.  So throughout his long life, and if fact he lived until 1964, his committed passions to writing, to theater, to photography and to philanthropy afforded him a very important position in the social and cultural imagination of both whites and African-Americans.  This was a really important individual who had a lot of influence and a lot of clout, not just in terms of the African-American culture and art, but also in the right literary and artistic circles.  A lot of clout.  He knew everybody.  If you were a person of any note in the social realm or the cultural realm, you knew Van Vechten and chances are he photographed you at some particular point.  So, this exploitation of African-Americans and their culture was actually going to become the ticket to Van Vechten’s notoriety.  A lot of people take issue with how he went about it, and they actually choose to deny his significance altogether, but he was a very important figure in the Harlem renaissance, and his role in this movement was basically as a patron.  For example, giving Langston Hughes his contract for publishing his first book.  Van Vechten was responsible for that.  So we’re dealing with someone who’s very, very important here.  In his photography he mostly specialized in portrait photography, and that’s how we know Van Vechten really, by these very public photographs of, for example, that’s Langston Hughes here on the right.  These kind of images are what his reputation are basically based on, and not only was his intention to use photography as an outlet for his artistic expression and as an instrument of cultural and racial documentation, in fact, that’s why he did these images, he says he’s documenting the race and culture of the period.  So he was an avid cataloger and documenter and that’s exactly what he used photography for.  So these are the images that Van Vechten’s reputation are based on.  However, at the same time that he was creating these images which basically uplift--are intended to give us scrubbed and pure image of African-Americans--at the same time, he was busy in his dark room doing this, and by the way he was actually he had built a darkroom in his apartment in mid-town Manhattan when he got enthusiastic about photography and started developing his own film and did everything as a photographer.  As he was doing these kinds of photographs, he was also creating a body of images that lay claim to a terrible honesty, and these images are private images.  He has these scenarios that are set up in the studied where he’s got these very suggestive images of a black man and a white man, and by the way the two people in these photographs in this body of work that I want to show you, are the same models that he uses over and over again.  We know who the white model is, this is Hugh Lang, he was a very important ballet dancer with Anthony Tutor’s ballet core, in fact he was a lover of Anthony Tutor as well, and a very good friend of Carl Van Vechten and he was Van Vechten’s favorite model.  The black model, we don’t know much about him.  In fact, we only know his name, which we believe to be Fuente Meadows and there’s no biographical information about him, all we know is that he’s probably a dancer who was associated with the circle of dancers around Van Vechten.  It’s these kind of images that he started making in 1932.  So either in the studio or out in the open in these suggestive kinds of environments--all of these photographs are part of a very large collection later given by Van Vechten to the Library at Yale, this is where they are, in which, when he gave this collection to them, he instructed that these photographs which were in 13 boxes, they were to be sealed.  They were not to be opened until 25 years after his death.  So it was clear to him that these images would have not looked very well upon him as a patron of the arts.  Also, the fact that he’s trying to keep his public and private life very, very separate.  In fact, acting as if--being such a social and public figure to the extent that he’s denying that private life.  In fact, many people believed he had no private life because everything was constantly social, he was constantly out there, but these really lay claim to a very private sort of Van Vechten that was going on during this time.  I want to talk a little bit about camp and camp sensibility.  He’s very heavily into that.  Theater, the theatrical elements.  The whole interest in black and white and posing black and white become very, very significant for Van Vechten because he believed in his philanthropy and in his collecting, he believed that the reason for racial strife was the fact that black people and white people didn’t know each other.  So he figured if they were put together and they had to know each other, then there would be social harmony.  This kind of thing would occur.  So this comes out of that realm of thinking.  So these boxes were sealed for 25 years.  They were opened in 1989, and now having come out of their archival confines, we can actually critically assess these images and aesthetically appreciate them or defame them, whichever you would like to do, that depends on a lot of things, but we can look at these within the context of what we know about Van Vechten’s life motivations, his connections with the African-American community in New York from 1932 until his death in 1964.  So these images are rare, and they’re very interesting in that they engage a very ambivalent dialogue on the nature of Van Vechten’s own struggles with identity, with desire, and with history.  So they really speak to that.  At the same time, they  operate to simultaneously praise and to police black male sexuality and the body, they constitute what I see anyway, as a very significant body of images representative of the tension between Van Vechten’s public personae as a respected patron and promoter of African-American art and culture and his private thoughts and feelings resulting from his all-consuming relationship with African-Americans, with his quest to be modern, and the need to give tangible evidence to his homoerotic propensities.  Now Van Vechten was married to a woman, he was married twice.  He was married and divorced very early on, I believe in 1908 or 1909, divorced very quickly after that and then married a woman named Tanya Marinoff who was a Russian actress, and stayed with her for many years until his death.  But despite that, he was very, very active in the gay community and the white gay community in New York as well as in the gay community in Harlem.  In fact, he was very much so a part of, for example, the drag balls that took place in Harlem.  He was very much a part of that, he was a judge for the competitors in that.  All of his friends, most of his friends in the theater world, the dance world, the literary world, most of these people were gay and so he really was in this circle.  I believe it’s interesting that these sequestered images that he probably had them sealed, not only to protect his reputation, but also Tanya Marinoff, his wife.  She lived for many years after him.  So I think he had that in mind as well because she constantly denied his homosexual propensities, even though everyone knew it.  Everyone understood and knew exactly what was going on at this time. 

So these images are really problematic on many levels, and I just want to indicate that they are problematic in one respect, in that they call into question or you ask whether or not they disqualify or call into question or serious doubt Van Vechten’s public face of sincerity and integrity.  In other words, the whole issue of white patronage and sincerity, the sincerity related to that.  Do these representations of inter-racial fantasies, which they are, reinforce or undermine racist myth about black sexuality and/or about interracial cooperation and harmony.  That’s a question that comes up.  Should the discernments of racial and sexual fantasies through representation, for example, overwhelmingly dictate or determine our view and judgment of an individual’s public faith and actions.  Ultimately, the question comes up as to whether or not we can trust photographic representation as a reliable barometer of both psycho-sexual conditions and also social realities.  So these are really important questions that keep propping up with these particular images.  However, when everything is said and done, these works are also interesting in that they spotlight the emotional and social complications that result from the human necessity to satisfy and yet balance private needs and public standing.  So the whole idea of the public and the private really plays a very interesting role in these works as well.  They also exemplify very unstable regions and intersections in fantasies, desires and social realities.  Because of this, because of the complex questions that they raise, they provoke sentiments and questions that cannot be resolved with a singular yes or no or good or bad or racist or sympathetic response.  They’re too complex for that.  The context is too complex, as well as the images are too complex.  A lot of people say, “oh, Van Vechten was a racist.”  Well, that’s very easy to say, but when you look at his work and you see the complexity of the individual in relationship to the complexity of the African-American community, then it becomes very, very iffy.  It becomes very ambiguous.  Things become very confused at that point.  In my opinion, this is why it’s worth looking into these images.  I think it’s a world that’s worth entering and exploring. 

The racial and interracial representations that are created by Van Vechten allow for very interesting interventions in the debates centered around the complex bringing together of race, homosexuality and visual culture, and I’m not the first to deal with that.  A very contemporary thinker to actually think about these issues, is Kobena Mercer who has written a lot about Mapplethorp’s images of black men.  In his writings he focuses on homoerotic net worth of looking.  He wrote something--did you read?  I forgot what I gave you to read.  Something about Kobena Mercer?  No?  Well, Kobena Mercer wrote something about Mapplethorp’s images of black men and at first he took a very negative stance towards them--he thought they were racist, they’re terrible, these are really a denigration of the black male form.  Then, later, he wrote another essay where he re-thought his whole attitude.  And he realized that those images are not as simple as they appear.  That, in fact, even though he railed against them, he liked them.  They were erotic.  They were really sensual and they were very attractive, so he started to rethink the whole issue of racial representation, but also homoerotic networks of looking, so he’s interested in the whole idea of spectatorship.  His own consumption of those images, and what we find with his writings is that things are not as black and white, so to speak, as they appear.  That things become much more complex than one would imagine.  So I look at these images, in fact, I discovered these images when I was having--Martin Duberman who’s a historian told me that there were these images at the Beinecke Library.  He had no idea what they looked like because he hadn’t seen them, so I thought I was interested in Van Vechten so I went down to see what there was and as I got box #1 out and took out all the photographs, the whole reading room could hear me gasp.  Then I went back and got another one and “gasp” and I went back and got another one.  There were 13 of them, so 13 bursts of gasping when I saw these images.  The reason I gasped is because I knew about Van Vechten, but I didn’t know this much about Van Vechten and also, I liked them.  I think they’re interesting images.  They’re not--one could read them in a racist way but then I thought, let me look at these closer, and then think about Kobena Mercer and his ideas about net worth of looking  and I realized that there’s something very interesting with these images in their theatricality, in their seemingly bland and there’s a blandness about them that’s very attractive, and as we’ll see later, unlike other artists who are depicting black men, for example, who use classical references and put classical reference onto the afro-centric body, Van Vechten doesn’t do that.  In fact, he exploits primitive modes of visualization and does it in a very interesting camp bland fashion that speaks to the tongue and cheek in terms of his relationship to African-Americans and the whole idea of modernist primitivism.  It gets really quite interesting and quite involved in that respect.

Audience:  How can you put “camp” before the word “bland?”

Smalls:  It’s interesting that you said that because one of the things I find about Van Vechten is that he’s full of polarities, full of contradictions in his work.  Black and white, that’s the starting point, black and white, then you see anal and phallic, those are two polarities that he uses, the use of light and dark becomes very important for him.  The idea of bland and at the same time, camp.  Bland and theatrical.  They’re theatrical but they’re also--almost like, you think about Warhol and his sort of Camp but bland attitude.  I was thinking about that.  There’s actually an interesting parallel that one could do between Van Vechten, his attitude, and his imagery.  Also, people in his life--Van Vechten wrote a lot of letters.  He corresponded with a lot of people.  We have two volumes of letters with Gertrude Stein, for example.  He was a very good friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, very good friend of Langston Hughes, we have a new volume out of letters between Langston Hughes and Van Vechten, and he wrote to a lot of other people.  When you read his letters and also his social acquaintances will tell you, he was very flippant about life.  For him, it was serious what he was doing, but it was all very off the wall and flippant.  He could do both simultaneously.  So to answer your question, you’re right.  How can you put bland and camp together?  With Van Vechten you can. 

One of the things that Van Vechten’s photographs do is they underscore modern identity by indulging in sexual and racial fantasies through modernistic contrivances and voyeuristic posturing.  For example, his more blatant modernist experiments in photography play on this idea of sexual innuendo in their suggestion of the sexual position.  He has these interesting images where he’s doing these double exposures of African-American men, and the way he’s done it is so that he’s suggesting the sexual position ‘69.  He’s using one model to do this, so this idea here of the fragmenting, doubling, serializing of body parts, all of this has modernist connotations, owes a lot to jazz imagery, owes a lot to contemporary cubists and surrealists explorations of form.  And by the way, Van Vechten was very good friends, of course, with all his contemporary photographers like Stiglitz, and all of them.   He was very good friends with those people.  He knew their work and they knew, I don’t know if they knew these works, but they knew his public images.  In fact, I believe that during his lifetime, he didn’t show these images.  They were never publicly exhibited and his intention was not to show them to anybody except for, I suspect, his most trusted, intimate clique of people.  For example, George Platt Lynes was a very, very good friend of his and they both have actually parallel careers, and I’m certain because of some of the images that George Platt Lynes did that he saw Van Vechten’s imagery.  So there’s an interesting line between Van Vechten, it actually goes back to F. Hall, Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes and Mapplethorpe.  There are a lot of images that Mapplethorpe produced that I see with Van Vechten.  I can see how they came.  I can’t prove that but just visually you get some idea that that’s what is going on. 

So these images are interesting in that they, taken as a legitimate means of transgression in the areas of sex, race and art, these experimental photographs and others in the archive stage a sexualized and voyeuristic act in the guise of modern collage art. That’s basically what they do, they serve to give a visual record to all the taboo things designed to simultaneously satisfy Van Vechten’s private, erotic and public artistic urges.  So again, that public and private really are here in these works and in their voyeuristic spying onto the racialized spectacle of autoeroticism, and that’s basically what he’s doing, these images equate a constructed narcissism of the object of desire with self recognition by the photographer.  So it’s not just him photographing, of course it’s him being very much involved, being very much so not only a voyeur, but actually being a participant in the very act that is taking place.  Moreover, they constitute evidence of the inner machinations of race and sex as decisive and necessary components in Van Vechten’s photographic enterprise.  So race and sex become very, very prominent in his photography and in his writing as well.  When you look at Nigger Heaven, for example, that’s what that novel’s about.  It’s about race and it’s about sex, those two things.  So that comes together also in these photographs.  The fantasy of control and mastery was also coupled with the studied themes of racial and erotic contemplation, both within the photograph itself and through the privileged position of a spectator as being an outsider here.  Actually we see this in another pair of interesting photographs.  By the way, these works come from the 30s and the 40s.  We don’t have the exact date of these, and also there’s no sequence indicated, so what I’m showing you is my sequence because to me, for example, these two works I see as happening in the same session.  I don’t know which came first.  I assume this one on the right came first as opposed to that one, but I’m not certain.  So do be aware of that.  This is one of the sort of problems and the exciting things about archives where you don’t have that much information, you’re making your own narrative.  As a result of that, these works have a very interesting import for me, as a person who’s excited about these archives and trying to make sense about these archives, so do realize that because we don’t have that much information about them, it’s difficult to know what comes first, or whether or not they’re actually taken in the same session.  So these pair of photographs show here on the right an African-American man beholding an African statuette, the angular positioning of his body, his hands, his arms, his buttocks, his legs, all those angularities, those angular shapes, of course, are mirrored in the very object that he holds.  In other words he’s looking at his own primitiveness.  He’s a photographer who’s looking at a black man who’s contemplating his own primitiveness.  Then he’s using the idea of the angularity of the African statuette in the form of the figure itself and presenting that with a backdrop and a spotlight as if this is a theatrical event that’s unfolding and then, suddenly, he translates that angularity into the black figure as a dancer who’s taking on these very angular forms.  Of course, angularity and the whole idea of the primitive is very much at issue here, and also the whole idea of the black body as fetish, as fetishized object and the idea of the photographer as being an expert in terms of black art and black culture.  So here he’s photographing it, he’s contriving it, he’s controlling it.  Van Vechten is black art, basically, which is basically the message here that can be read from this.  So he succeeded at objectifying the black body as fetish object and transfers it onto the cultural aspect of African art and the ethnology of black dance.  And by the way, he was a dance critic for the New York Times, he’s also a theater critic for the New York Times, and he wrote a lot about black dance.  He knew a lot about the innovations in terms of modern dance at that time.  So he was an expert in everything or he considered himself to be an expert in everything that had to do with black culture. 

Audience:  I was just wondering, you used the word primitive and primitivism a couple of times, I’m wondering is that Van Vechten or is that you?

Smalls:  Primitivism, for us all, is an unstable term.  When I’m referring to it, I’m referring to it in its modernist sense, the whole idea, for example of the appropriation of African forms, appropriated by modern artists to create a sense of modernity.  Someone like Picasso, for example, is dealing with issues of the primitive in terms of his art.  Primitive also has another connotation and that has to do with a state of being, the whole idea of being in an “edenic” state, as Michele Learist talks about it--like Eden, “edenic”.  I’ll hopefully get to that and explain it in a second.  But I do realize I’m using that word primitivism very quickly, but it is a very complex term.  By the way, all of this is being worked up into a manuscript and I do explain it.  It needs to be explained very carefully.

Another thing, in almost all of these photographs Van Vechten also exploited the black and white medium to play off and construct dualistic meanings in contrasting aspects of race and culture.  He cleverly plays with the idea of black and white on multiple levels artistically.  He uses black and white photography to pattern black and white bodies in black and white poses or situations or alternating harmonized and polarized tension.  In other words, for Van Vechten, opposites attract and that’s what he’s working on with these images.  These images also assist in the codification of a schema in which elements of the racial, the sexual, the artistic highly theatricalized and performed interweave in a matrix of subjectively defined relationships between the races.  So he’s very interested in creating that.  His endeavor to unify the primitive and modern and his attempts to project an impression of mutual gratification and fantasy indulgence through erotic exchanges between white and black men are reinforced through formal means of patterning in his photographs.  In particular, careful choices of background designs, studio props and poses.  That’s one of the interesting things about his works, too.  Everything in his photographs are very carefully planned and worked out.  The backdrops, the props, the poses.    Even though you get this sense of blandness, it’s heavily, heavily planned.  He very much thought about the backdrops and the props and the poses before he engaged in photographing the subject.  For example, these two works really are interesting in that they illustrate the interracial and spectatorial point, so in the confines of the studio environment in both of these instances, you have two male figures, one white, one black, placed against a curtain backdrop with arms raised above their heads and bodies poised in a mirroring contrapposto stance or pose.  Again, that mirroring, that idea of white/black being juxtaposed.  The foreground white figure has his back and buttocks exposed to the viewer while the backgrounded black man is frontally positioned to reveal full face and also genitalia.  Both figures are feminized here in that their bodily positions actually recall those curvilinear poses that we typically associate with women in western art.  So it’s not just the white man feminizing the black man, he’s doing it to both white and black.  Both figures are objectified as passive objects of desire.  The stress on the contrast of skin color here has replaced the norm of sexual difference here, so that’s another interesting thing--he uses black and white and has replaced the whole idea of male and female with that color difference.  Usually, particularly when you think of primitivism, it’s usually white males and dark skinned females that are juxtaposed.  So Van Vechten has homoeroticized the primitive aesthetic and idea of this work.  With this, the black male figure then becomes the phallic counterpart to the anally vulnerable white man, so the whole idea of the phallic versus the anal, it becomes very, very important again for Van Vechten and he also reverses that, usually with black men, and he knows these stereotypes, that black men are associated with the phallic.  Well, in some of these images black men are associated with the anus and not the phallic and white men are associated with the phallic.  In other words, he exchanges those stereotypes in order, again, to break down those scenarios, the barriers between black and white, and bring both together in these very idealized, utopian, images.  That, by the way, were only for his eyes in that respect, they have a psychological, sort of reinforcement of his social.  In other words, what he’s trying to do in his social life in bringing blacks and whites together, these private images are almost like psychological reinforcements of that. Yeah, I’m doing the right thing and I’m also artist and being very productive and artist about it.  Other people don’t know that, but I’ll show them the public images of the black people I photograph, because we know those images.  Also, his public deeds.  But here in the private realm, he’s trying to do the same kind of thing.  With the work there on the left, even when you have this sort of antagonistic sort of poses with the two figures, again, this element of harmony seems to arrive.  What I find interesting is you have this curtain backdrop with this spotlighting which is very much so theatrical, or gives a sense of a theater stage, whereas the work on the left has that glittery, and we see that often sometimes in his work, backdrop giving a sort of illusionary sort of quality, like this is happening in another space and another time.  That’s how I’m reading it anyway.  Next one please.

With this one, he’s also playing with black and white, but whole ideas of curva-linearity and angularities.  Again, polarities.  Curva-linear and angular.  He’s playing with those formalistic ideas and creating these interesting shadow patterns on the bodies of the figures.  But this whole issue of black and white is very much in evidence in these works.  So the idea of harmonizing bodies, and once again, I think Van Vechten not only understood the photographic power of the notion that opposites attract, but also gives a socio-aesthetic import to it as well.  In other words these are not just aesthetic images; they have a social significance and also a psychological significance for Van Vechten. 

What I want to talk about now is the lure of the primitive and the loss of self, that’s what I want to call the following images that I’m going to talk about.  Van Vechten tapped into standard notions of primitivism as modernist expression, as you were questioning, and according to Hal Foster, who is a contemporary thinker and writer of particularly post-modern society, in his assessment of the underlying dynamics of primitivism, two things occur in its modernist form.  On the one hand there is an explicit desire to break down the cultural oppositions between European and primitive.  By primitive I mean other.  I’m talking about like the African other or this notion of the savage other.  So there’s that interest in breaking down the barriers between those two and Van Vechten is very interested in that idea. Also in breaking down the oppositions between culture and nature, as well as the deeper psychological oppositions that underlie those things, for example, the notions of active versus passive, the idea of masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual.  Those ideas play a very big role within modernist primitivism.  I think what’s interesting about Van Vechten is that he’s exploiting those things in a homoerotic vein.  No other artists was doing that at the time.  He’s the only one who’s really doing this kind of thing.

So there’s that and on the other hand, there’s the implicit insistence on maintaining these oppositions, because the primitivist seeks to be both opened up to difference, racial difference, sexual difference, social difference, cultural difference, and also be fixed in opposition to the other so as to exert a certain amount of mastery or control over the other. Furthermore, Van Vechten’s images also attest to this idea of not only identification with and desire for the other, but also the idea of periodic subversion, parody.  Subverting through parody of the other and one’s relationship with the other, and we’ll see that with the camp images.  He’s really parodying the other and his relationship with the other.  During the 1930s primitivism became part of a modernist push to idealize the past and in this context there’s an equally important and more immediate aspect to the concept of primitivism that comes into play with these images.  In early 20^th century modernist practice, white engagement with the primitive was viewed as a sign of social and artistic sophistication.  So at this time in the 30s and 40s, if you engaged in ideas of the primitive, you were seen as a sophisticated artist.  You were sophisticated; you were avant-garde in this particular respect.  So places, events and things associated with Africa were, and here to employ that term used by Michele Learist, who was a critic poet and anthropologist, he called it “edenic,” like Eden, from Eden.  That is, a conceptual site of ritual intoxication for whites.  So indulgence in the primitive was taken as one way to put aside or to momentarily suspend ones racial and cultural identity and become one with the other.  So this is the purpose of it.  And, taking pleasure in the losing of self in the other served to disrupt historical spatial and social oppositions between white and black.  This is what Van Vechten really was doing.  So as an admirer and as a patron of African-American art and letters, Van Vechten shared also in his contemporaries beliefs that persons of African descent retained many of those elemental qualities, the spiritual or primitive qualities that white people had lost through over sophistication.  So they want to get back to the primitive--get back to that natural rhythm of life, and this was the reason for that.  So the process of losing ones self in the primitive is explicitly revealed in a series of Van Vechten photograph in which themes of sacrifice and ritualize enactments of suggested erotic violence and violation between black and white men are most profound.  Oh, that’s from the Harmony series that I was showing you before, and he uses dance and the whole idea of dance.  Dance becomes a very important metaphor for Van Vechten.  Go forward please. 

Two of these incredible photographs you see here show a white man draped over an African drum and in this sort of masochistic abandon of an active self-sacrifice to primitive rhythms.  So the idea that the white man is being sacrificed is very profound here.  In the second of the two images, the white man is presented nude, he’s bound at the hands and feet and draped over the African drum.  He’s about to be stabbed, scarified, by the black man who crouches before him clutching a knife.  Of course, keeping in camp sensibility form here, what Van Vechten has done is he’s given the black man a dull butter knife from the nearest café.  So it’s a very campy and kitsch idea.  It’s a dull butter knife and it also has these erotic connotations, that phallic, that whole idea of being pierced by the knife.  Also, the decorative floral backdrop is perhaps intended to impart a two-fold sense of this event happening in those edenic jungles of Africa.  Also, on the theatrical stage.  So it’s very theatrical and it’s very much part of the “edenic.”  Now, the counterpart photo evokes the white man’s complete loss of self and his willing sacrifice to Africa as both ideal and experience.  Here the white subject is alone, he’s completely nude, and he’s uncomfortably splayed over that drum.  The plain backdrop and the glittery floor material intentionally underscores the artificial in the theatrical setting for an offering that’s taking place on an African drum as an alter.  We can think of the drum as an alter.  Now because the white man here is alone and he’s set up only to the viewer’s gaze, and of course, the viewer is Van Vechten.  That’s the person that these were made for, so because of that, the offering of self becomes a private affair for the photographer who desires to envision himself as the one sacrifice on the sacred alter of Africa, thereby identifying himself as both a captive of Africa and a martyr.  And that was Van Vechten.  He’s a captive and he considered himself--I’m doing this for the good of black people.  He considered himself to be a martyr but he was also a captive fan on African-American art and culture.  A redolent of love of lament and sacrifice, the photograph imparts a very interesting--I was thinking about this in terms of Langston Hughes.  You’ve heard of Langston Hughes, there’s that quote in which he talks about we younger Negro artists are now going to produce art without shame or being ashamed of what we do--I don’t know if any of you are familiar with that, but it’s a very important part of something that Langston Hughes wrote, and in that he talks about the tom-tom laughs and the tom-tom cries.  I thought that was very interesting in terms of relating that to the whole idea of the tom-tom, the whole idea of a drum, as laughing and also crying, in terms of Van Vechten. 

There’s all sorts of psychoanalytic things one could say about this, and there’s one thing I do want to say that this idea that the pleasure of violating another is not simply a product of self-assertion, it also involves the masochistic perversion of self-violation.  So in a Freudian sense, then, Van Vechten’s photographic scenes of sacrifice here become a symbolic version of cannibalism and a sacred transcendental version of suicide, a version in which the voluntary destruction or the offering of self actually becomes or achieves social significance.  In other words, the very interesting psychoanalytic aspect to this has to do with the idea of self-sacrifice and the whole idea of self-sacrifice as achieving social significance.  I’m reading these, of course, as authorial projection.  In fact, this is not new for Van Vechten, because in his literature he does the same thing, he injects himself into his characters, or aspects of himself into his characters.  So it’s really not unreasonable to see this.

Audience:  Where does that leave the black man in here?  What role does he play in this composition?  You didn’t talk about that.  The violence, being portrayed as a brute.

Smalls:  In this instance he’s the aggressor, of course, right?  He’s the aggressor but this is why it’s important to me, because the white man is a willing victim.  He’s willing.  And we’ll see another photograph soon.  He’s willing.  He wants this to happen. 

Audience:  I know, but still, he’s in the position of power.

Smalls:  Right, the black man is in a position of power.

Audience:  But what kind of power exactly?  How is the black man portrayed in that photograph?

Smalls:  Uh, oh!  He’s not in power anymore!  (Technical difficulty)  But you’re right.  He is in a position of power and this is another characteristic of Van Vechten’s too, he places in a lot of his photographs, the black man in a position of power, but there is some question as to the effectiveness in the nature of that power.  It’s still power given by a white man to the black figure. 

Audience:  This photograph, specifically, is different from the rest of the work because he’s explicitly putting the black man in a position where he’s the brute, the savage, even though he’s giving him that power, it’s not the type of power that he’s giving to himself.  I was wondering if you can talk about the position of the black man in this photograph.

Smalls:  As I mentioned, Van Vechten does give this black man power in that he’s the aggressor, however it’s a false power.  It’s a false sense of power because you have Van Vechten, the photographer, the eye here, who’s sort of salivating over this scene, right, so he’s constructed it, he’s created it, so the black man really has no power.  It’s just sort of semblance of power, and I think for me, this is sort of a therapeutic idea for Van Vechten.  I’m giving the black man certain power.  I’m reversing the whole notion of the racist dimension, and I’m giving him power.  See how benevolent I am?  And that’s also reinforcing my own belief in what I’m doing.  And by the way, Van Vechten had a lot of resistance in the black community from many people.  The most avid person to be very anti-Van Vechten was W. E. B. DuBois.  He hated Van Vechten.  He didn’t like him.  He thought he was a racist person who was exploiting African-Americans in a very negative way.  And indeed he was, to a certain extent, but there are complications to that as well.

Audience:  Just the idea of you saying Van Vechten is giving this black man power negates the man’s power. 

Smalls:  Right.  Exactly.

Younger:  James, do you think you could fit it into an S&M idea, too?

Smalls:  Absolutely!  Absolutely!  Yes, and we’ll see more.  Yes, S&M is very much a part of--or suggestions of sadomasochistic acts are very much a part of a lot of these images.

Audience:  Before I move on, I wanted to add to that, when we’re talking about willing sacrifice of the white male, I believe Henry tried to mention this, that usually obviously sacrifice is done by force onto someone else, so it’s yet another inversion there, right?  Where it’s a position of privilege to be able to sacrifice yourself.

Smalls:  Exactly.  And Van Vechten saw it that way.  You’re right.  Good point. 

Audience:  Just a question about that.  Visually, could you speak about why is the white man’s feet bound in one image where he’s being sacrificed and not bound in another.  Because that completely complicates exactly what you just said.  That doesn’t hold up at all.

Smalls:  Right, I was just thinking about that.  Right, because the fact that he’s bound here doesn’t mean that he wants it, he’s an unwilling sacrifice, and here he’s not bound which means he is a willing sacrifice.  I don’t know what to say about that.  That image on the right does complicate things.  It really throws . . .

Audience:  It sort of, I mean we’re sitting in the corner talking about it, so it dilutes it, it adds water.  I’m having problems following along because in each set of images there are these little things that take me away, so I don’t know if you’ve considered those bound feet before.

Smalls:  I have considered them but now I’m considering them more in terms of what you’ve brought up.  One of the problems with these images is that we’re reading them.  I’m reading them.  Van Vechten made them.  He didn’t say a word about them.  He didn’t write anything about them.  He said  nothing about them.  So as I mentioned, this is exciting but it’s also frustrating.  It’s exciting and frustrating--a polarity.  Van Vechten again.  That we’re seeing these images, we don’t know anything about them, and we’re reading them.  Knowing what we know about Van Vechten and trying to discern what he’s doing.  So yeah, there are contradictions and I will be thinking about that contradiction.

Audience:  (End of tape)

It doesn’t change the power structure.  That’s could be if you want to read it like that--you could just read it as a guy paying an S&M to tie him up and do the thing, but that means that he pays to be in power, but he’s in power actually.  So you could read it on that level, I guess.  The bondage thing.

Smalls:  One of the things I do say about--there’s a section in terms of what I’ve written about and what I write about with these photographs and it has to do with spectatorship and the power of the viewer.  So one of the things about these images is that they allow for multiple positionalities of the viewer.  They allow for these sort of erotic fantasies, these multiple erotic fantasies, so it doesn’t close down meaning like a Mapplethorpe, which fixes the meaning of a sexual site.  It doesn’t do that.  It allows for the spectator to come at them from a variety of perspectives.  I think that’s very interesting in that sense, but also frustrating as I mentioned.

Audience:  I’m concerned.  Dumbfounded is good, too.  I’m confused.  You admit that you have, you’re setting the tone for these because there’s nothing written by Van Vechten, right?  And we only have the tenor of the times, and a lot of the terminologies you’re using and the concepts and theories are things that came much after in a much different time.  So I’m questioning how you would want to give that much credit--especially when people in his own--like W.E.B. DuBois, for example, question that.  You know?  It’s like the language in which you’re framing it in, and as a person who’s coming from a position of authority on these images because you’ve seen them and you’re analyzing them, and now you’re presenting them to us and to others.  So when you use words like primitivism, even if you want to frame it in that sort of modernist ideal, I think it’s problematic to think that that whole, like what Picasso and those guys were doing in terms of looking to Africa for imagery and co-opting that as opposed to giving it equal credit, because at the time they made it they didn’t necessarily acknowledge the fact that it was coming from Africa or necessarily giving it an equal do as a sort of reference.  So I think, I don’t know if you need to change the language but the only way the language could change is if like someone like yourself or others starts to employ--instead of saying primitivism, say, no, it’s from Africa or the Pacific Islands, or it’s from Asia. 

Smalls:  No, no.  It’s from neither.  It’s a concoction by Van Vechten.

Audience:  Exactly!  So then it’s not necessarily authentic.  It’s this sort of search for the authentic and the primitive, right?

Smalls:  For Van Vechten.  For Van Vechten it was a search for the  authentic and the primitive, however, Van Vechten also understood the other side of it.  He understood modernist primitivism, and that was acknowledged during the period.  Primitivism was a term that was used and he understood that during the time.  His relationship to that movement, as well as to African Americans, he understood as being serious and not serious at the same time.  He was able to really work both sides.  Also, I do say in my writings and in when I discuss these images that I am taking a schizophrenic approach to this particular approach.  On the one hand I find them very interesting and very alluring, but on the other side I also recognize, for example, the problems that they bring up in terms of the history of brutalization of the black body, of the black male form. There’s that contradiction there that Kobena Mercer also talks about.  He recognizes that here’s a white modernist depicting black bodies in this way that has a history.  At the same time, what do you do with those feelings that, “oh, it’s racist, but it’s really erotic and I’m attracted to it”?  What do you do?  Schizophrenia, right?  You’ve got these two things that are going on.  Pardon me?  You don’t think it’s schizophrenic? 

Audience:  But that’s my opinion. 

Smalls:  Yeah.  I don’t know what to say to you.  I think that the approach that I’m taking, the fact is one has to deal with primitivism when you’re looking at these works from the 30s and 40s.  You have to.  It absolutely must be addressed somehow.  You have to deal with issues of, in this instance, S&M.  And also the psychological affects – and during these times, the 30s and 40s, Freud’s ideas were very much so in vogue.  I don’t think I’m so far off the mark in terms of using a lot of these terms and ideas.  I’m constantly thinking about it.

Audience:  Are you problemitizing it as well, is my concern.

Smalls:  Is that it?  Somebody else?

Younger:  Let’s go on with the talk for a little bit and then you guys can go back and question it, because otherwise we won’t have time.

Smalls:  I want to go forward with these slides.  I want to talk about these because I want to talk about this whole idea of what I call visual slumming.  Because, in a way, all of Van Vechten’s male nude photographs constitute a kind of visual slumming.  In fact, in his social life we know that Van Vechten loved to go “slumming” into Harlem and brag that he had started that trend.  He actually, in writing, bragged that he started it.  So “slumming” was basically a slang term used to refer to the nighttime trek uptown into Harlem by downtown whites in order to partake of the various entertainment activities and leisure diversions such as jazz, dancing, alcohol, drugs and sex that Harlem and its black inhabitants seemed to readily provide.  That whole idea of the edenic, that idea of finding that sort of Eden in a place is also an important aspect here.  So Harlem then became a heart of darkness, and African Americans were its drumbeats.  This is reality.  That’s exactly what was going on during the time.  A black lyricist who’s name is Andy Razith actually directed everyone in a hit song that he wrote in 1930 called Go Harlem.  It was called Go Harlem and part of they lyrics were, “Like Van Vechten, start inspectin’.”  In the jargon of the time, venturing uptown came to be known, in fact, there was a word for it, Van Vechten-ing around.  Are you going Van Vechten-ing tonight?  So this idea of actually slumming was very much in evidence, so slumming with Van Vechten not only assured the adventurer quick familiarity with those establishments that catered to white tourists, but also introduced him or her to rent parties, basement clubs, drag balls that Van Vechten was also very much a part of.  His reputation of a leader of these white revelers provides evidence that he not only rode the wave of Harlemania, and that’s what this was called, Harlemania, but he single-handedly directed its direction.  And this is what’s interesting about him.  Even though people will dismiss and get angry at him, you can’t escape him.  He was a very, very big component of this period--of the Harlem Renaissance.  So what’s doing, he really had an impact on the period and on the art and artists of the period and also with these private images.  Also, his publication of Nigger Heaven in 1926 further whetted the appetite of white New Yorkers to go uptown to Harlem and to seek this “edenic” sort of paradise.  A person who’s actually written about the Harlem Renaissance, Nathan Huggins, has actually said that it was recognized at the time by a lot of African-Americans that this was happening, and many of them resented that.  However, there were also many blacks that accepted that and welcomed that because one of the things that slumming did was it brought downtown money uptown. This was a very important aspect of the economic aspect of this particular event that was going one.  Of course a lot of that money left again, but nonetheless, there was that economic aspect to this whole idea as well.  So slumming is a very important event that actually happened but it also is a lot like gay cruising in that both involve acts of transgression through investigatory, exploratory, adventurism for emotion, psychological and physical gratification.  Both seek to combine pleasure and purpose, and also the connection between slumming and cruising is made more emphatic though, for example, this series of photographs here produced in the 1940s in which black and white men encounter one another out in nature--in a natural environment. The figures pose nude in an environment intended to give a feel of forest or jungle.  They take these suggested positions of teasing sexual foreplay and implied sodomy and in these, the white man appears as if he’s lost in the bush and is delightfully surprised by the appearance of a native who suddenly appears, and again, even outside of the studio environment, interracial and homoerotic desire are here performed against a backdrop setting that invokes an “edenic” space in which all sorts of imaginative sexual acts and encounters are possible.  His obsessive fixation on the white mans’ relationship and proximity to the black male body and the latter suggestive primitiveness force an undecidedly autobiographical note of interracial desire and wish fulfillment onto these photographs, also as visual manifestations of modern colonial discourse, these images also attempt to simultaneously recognize and disavow differences between the races by producing for the white photographer, anyway, the sort of remote space of encounter, of discovery, of embracing the “primitive” through this voyeuristic surveillance and suggested erotic fantasies.  Fantasies of dominance and passivity.  One of the interesting things here is the close relationship between this kind of visual slumming and cruising in parks or other outdoor spaces is actually further underscored by the fact that the location in which these photographs were taken, bring to mind, even though we know, I know now through some research, that this actually was an estate of a friend of Van Vechten’s in Connecticut where he took these but these wooded areas reminds one, or reminds me anyway, and brings up the whole idea of a secluded area of gay socialization and sexual contact located in Central Park, known as the ramble, and at the time, during the 30s and 40s, it was nicknamed the fruited plain.  It was called that.  And I’m not surprised, I wouldn’t be surprised if Van Vechten was more than familiar with the existence of that place, so these photos are interesting in that they link the idea of gay cruising with slumming into Harlem, and he brings both of these events as staged performances into the privacy of his darkroom.  So in this instance, this is very interesting indeed.  What you were saying makes me think about something.  There’s something I should  mention here.  Several years ago, I think it was 1995, there was a conference here in New York called Black Nations, Queer Nations.  I don’t know if you remember it or heard about it, but it was a very important conference and I took some of these images and I gave a talk on some of these images and what was very interesting is that a lot of the gay black men in attendance at that particular conference really, really loved these photographs and thought they were really wonderful.  Much better than Mapplethorpe, much better than anything George Platt Lynes would do.  They felt these were really hot, basically.  It was interesting.  I was very surprised at that reaction.  A year later, I went to San Francisco to give a talk at a Harlem Renaissance conference where the emphasis was on artists of the Harlem Renaissance, gave the same talk, and was attacked right and left.  In other words, the whole issue of the race issue and the sex issue, many people cannot deal with those things coming together, and with Van Vechten’s work, they must be put together.  I think that creates a lot of uneasiness and anger in some people.  In that respect, I think they’re interesting because these photographs that provoked that kind of anger and that kind of sentiment in people even today must say something about them.  They must say something if indeed that is the case.

I just want to also talk a little bit about the idea of camp, because Van Vechten is very much so a part of camp.  His interesting in photographic documentation and collecting actually dovetails with, not only his homoerotic sensibilities, but also with engagement with camp culture.  So his gay identity and camp sensibility intersect with this exotic kind of primitivism, put into the service of locating and charting that creative approach to visualizing African Americans and their culture.  This is what the works try to do.  What’s interesting is I also make a comment in terms of writing and in terms of Susan Sontag who has written about photography, of course, and she says a lot of interesting things about photography, but also years before wrote about her notes on camp.  So the whole idea of photography and camp as being linked is something very, very interesting and I think Van Vechten exploited the combination of those two things.  These photographs are, well, there are complications involved in terms of the notion of camp and kitsch and what these mean, but I think for Van Vechten he really was engaging in camp, and I don’t think his primitivized images of African-Americans were intended as direct racist commentary, even though they were underlying racist in terms of their meaning but I do believe that he believed that he was actually subverting the racist scenario and using camp in order to do that.  Camp actually grew out of gay culture’s process of recoding the sexual significance of gender and Van Vechten plays with the relationship between camp and gender by substituting gender difference with racial difference, and as such, he embarks upon this self-conscious process of deconstructing the usual codes of primitivism that typically rely on that back and forth play between heterosexuality and racial difference.  Camp, the definition of camp is very problematic.  It’s also very imprecise and very contentious, but despite disagreement among many scholars as to the exact definition of the term, all agree on some basic themes that camp involves.  For one thing, most agree that camp is a style or form of aestheticism that favors exaggeration, artist and extremity, and that it engages various forms of irony, theatricality and humor.  So furthermore, many people can see that camp is affiliated with gay sensibility and that has its own special definition, particularly in terms of its conscious eroticism in which the normalization of heterosexual desire is thrown into question.  In other words, heterosexuality itself is thrown into question.  So these are problematic, and this whole issue gay sensibility is also problematic, but in its broad sense, we can call it a creative energy between and among gay people, reflecting a consciousness that is different from the mainstream, a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling, of being and of doing.  More recently camp has been written into the history of white, gay male politics.  There’s a realization that has come about that camp can and does play a very important role in achieving political ends.  No Van Vechten would have winced at that notion because he actually was very strange in that he maintained a critical dislike and disinterest in all forms of overt racial and sexual politics.  In fact, he despised academics and what I’m doing here, what I’m saying about his works, he would absolutely hate or despise that.  Now whether or not camp is gay or political or whether or not a unique gay sensibility exists, those remain debatable issues, however, one thing is certain.  Camp and gay sensibility can be volatile in the domains of the sexual and the cultural, and as politics, camp proceeds from and reinforces a strategy whose goal is to obtain some kind of control over ones own life and relationship with others.  This is what camp does.  So a middle-class identification with camp is based on unique contradictions.  Instead of contradictions, namely that gestural excess signifies a lack of self and therefore a lack of membership in the social body.  Now this really, I think, psychologically describes Van Vechten because even though he’s a social individual and he wanted to become part of black cultural strife.  He got a lot of resistance, right?  So he was constantly trying but pushed away.  So I think his use of camp again, like his photographs, were used as a psychological reinforcement for his act; for his public standing, his public being. 

I better move on.  In many of his photographs in which a sole black figure implies white presence in the gaze.  The black man becomes an ethnographic construction and representative of the concept “Africa.”  He does that a lot in his works and in these images the black figure is scantly clad in African fabric or he wears paraphernalia of a sign of his African-ness.  In one of these photos the black subject frontally faces the camera in this sort of confrontation with the viewer, its upper torso heavily draped in this African cloth, but from the waist down he’s shown naked with his penis exposed.  The black man’s African essence, so to speak, is reduced to a scrap of fabric on which there are these notable African designs, complimented by the zebra skin carpet and patterned backdrop.  The black man has been posed in front of the camera as an ethnologized, sexualized object of study.  He becomes, then, the sign of a whole range of racial and sexual expectations related to a fixed concept, or really an unfixed concept, of the primitive.  So in this and other images of this sort Van Vechten simultaneously--what he’s doing is camping and sexualizing Africa as an idea and experience by way of manipulating sides of cultural dress and undress.  The idea of dress and undress become very important devises in these works.  In one such photograph that you see on the right, the nude black subject is sitting there before this multi-patterned backdrop with his hands raised in a mock gesture of surprise or surrender.  I don’t know, it’s difficult to read.  At his feet, again, you have that zebra carpet, evoking that sense of the savage or the idea of Africa.  His position with his legs spread apart, his arms lifted, also invite the viewer to fully inspect the “merchandise,” so to speak, and to aesthetically take in and appreciate the angularity of form created by this particular pose.  Next please. 

In another one of these photographs probably taken during the same session, the model here stands very frontally bare with his arms folded and a posture of defiance.  He wears only a necklace and a headband out of which sprout what looks like feathers, but I can’t make out what they actually are.  Perhaps we’re in the presence of an African chieftain?  I don’t know.  Or, a guardian figure of some sort with this dominant African statuesque-like presence?  I don’t know, it’s difficult to read this piece of work, but we do know that what is interesting is the idea that you have these various emblems, the necklace and the headdress, as being a sign of the African aspect of the model, the whole idea of acting-out, of role-playing, very much in evidence here.  On the right, this racialized photograph is interesting in that the black figure is situated in this artificial studio setting with his lower, half-covered in this cloth, bearing recognizable design patterns.  He’s shown here bending over as if he’s picking something up off the ground but if you look at it, there’s an element of camp here that’s really quite tongue-in-cheek in that if you look at the back part of his wrappings, you’ll see that it’s conspicuously open allowing for his buttocks to appear through his left hand placed atop his backside draws the viewers attention to that exposure, so the overall intention, it seems to me, of the photograph appears to be both ethnographic and sexual at the same time.  The self-consciously staged theatricality, the camp quality of this photograph needs to be acknowledged because, I think, well, the image can also be ready as a serious ethnographic document and primitivized reconstruction, really almost like men’s locker room humor?  If you think about it, and Van Vechten was really known for this in terms--particularly in his letters, when you read his letters, there’s a lot of code words and codings that he would use to communicate certain things that related to particularly gay issues.  In fact, other writers also did the same thing.  That would be an interesting study to find those codes and try to decipher those various codes.  I think it’s almost like primitivized, again, men’s locker room humor, you know, snap the towel, drop the soap kind of tongue-in-cheek humor while also complying with the usual objectives of primitivism by modernists.  Here Van Vechten also disrupts, I think it’s negative implications, by camping the very fact of fixation on the primitive black body.  So at the same time there’s this serious and non-serious aspect to it that really complicates things and makes for a difficult analysis of these works.  He’s taken the idea of the ethnographic photograph, but he sort of injects elements of theatricality and camp.  So you don’t know if he’s being serious or not.  It’s very difficult to know--he’s very elusive in that instance.  Next please.

Another interesting thing is the theatrical contrivance and the mask actually come together in Van Vechten’s photograph of the black man; displaying the mask in both instances, but in different places.  And by the way, the mask becomes very, very significant.  It becomes a very important icon of modernism during this particular period.  So if I were to write about this, I would have to discuss the whole iconography of the mask, the whole relevance of the mask, within modernism during this particular period.  So Van Vechten is taking the mask and exploiting it, but he’s adding an interesting camp sensibility to the idea of the mask, along with theatrical contrivance.  In this work, in dutifully if not reluctantly holding up the mask, the young black model invites the spectator to draw this comparison between his own face and that of the African artifact that he’s displaying.  The viewer is face to face, so to speak, with the black man whose face and body have been culturally and sexually coded as ethnographic.  The photograph here shows the same model holding the same mask over his genitals, so this before and after affect of the images carry with them a message of erotic mobility, so the change of the mask, the location of the mask, is significant in that it alters the viewers conversation with the mask and the black body, in the former photograph the dialogue is face to face, that is the model with the mask and we as viewers with the mask, with the latter photograph here on the right, the mask has become a fig leaf of sorts, covering the genitalia and encouraging a dialogue now between mask and penis.  Van Vechten has moved the conversation from the ethnographic to the sexual by putting the mask in dialogue with the penis so that we as viewers are now in a position to perform fellatio, and there are several images in which he suggests that whole idea of fellatio.  So these multiple exchanges take place in a sort of imagined jungle environment brought into the studio, pitched to this very high vibrancy here in that floral backdrop design.  He theatrically primitivizes the gesture here, and this primitivizing of the gesture functions effectively to transform the mask and the black figure holding it into an ethnographic item of note for the discriminating eye of the viewer, the holder as both an admirer and as a collector.  Could you go forward please?

In one very curious, yet beautiful photograph, Van Vechten upsets an assumed link between the mask, the black body and erotic desire by replacing the mask with a veil.  With this substitution, Van Vechten has intentionally drawn a connection between the mask and the veil because there is actually, well, I think he draws a connection between the two because the function of the mask and veil are very similar; there’s a similarity in terms of how they work.  The psychosexual implications of the veil have already been investigated by scholars who are interested primarily in examining the discourses of colonialism, imperialism, orientalism, and the male subjugation of women.  So people have a lot about the function of the veil.  The veil and the mask are comparable in that the mask lies behind the veil, and also both are not only things, but also constitute those already-mentioned metaphor spaces of habitation that help to classify and subjugate races and sexes.  Now despite his innovation and approach to the racial and interracial subject in these photographs, Van Vechten also plays on the stereotype here of white male dominance over racialized and eroticized bodies, however, he’s unique in this instance in that he disrupts the typical use of the veil here as a metaphor for male domination over females, and employs it in a homoeroticizing process which is quite interesting.  I need to say this about this, in her analysis of the function of the veil in art and thinking of the late 19^th century, the writer, Elaine Showalter, has questioned whether or not it is indeed possible for men to be allegorically veiled or unveiled figures.  She actually brings up that question.  And she concludes that due to the sexual symbolism implied in the act of veiling and unveiling, men cannot and do not generally represent themselves as veiled.  So for her, the idea, and I’m quoting here, “the idea of unveiling men is comic, implausible, and unthreatening, presumably because their bodies are not the symbolic carriers of modern society in modern society, either of creative or destructive forces.”  So clearly Van Vechten’s imagery upsets this notion here by substituting a black man’s body for that of a woman and using the veil in this particular instance.  Actually, Van Vechten’s use of the veil on the black male figure is both plausible and also meaningful if you consider that veiling and unveiling are metaphorical acts of self-revelation.  That’s what they do.  The whole idea of self-revelation with the veil is very much in evidence.  Although the veil is symbolic of confinement, closure and mystery, usually put on women, it is also extremely permeable--the whole idea of the veil as being permeable, and it signifies a means to simultaneously enter and exit the possibilities of another sphere, another sexuality, and another self.  So that’s the symbolism of the veil, and when you think about that in relation to Van Vechten, it makes sense that he’s doing that here.  So in this sense, the purpose of the veil is very close, again, to the function of the mask.  Van Vechten has given a primitivized, a homoeroticized twist, to the meaning of the veil as not only approximating that side of habitation and “edenic” experience, but also as a point of gender confluence and also camp performance.  That’s what he’s basically doing here.  What’s interesting about this is that this adds specific meaning when we look at another image, here on the right, in which he’s used the same prop to show the white man as netted by the black figure.  So this net, again it’s the same prop used to suggest the veil, and the primitivized interracial and homoerotic ritual here is played out as if on a stage, conscientiously performed in front of this glittery backdrop material, the use of which creates the crude impression of a self-contained, hallucinatory dream-like space in which erotic fantasies between the races are played out.  It also reinforces the theatrical and performative tenor of the theme.  Once again, I read the white figure here in the net here as an authorial projection, of Van Vechten himself, that is, Van Vechten indulging in primitivist activity as a thrilling theatrical event.  So in doing so, the photographer takes a certain amount of pleasure and satisfaction in his role as victim of and lord over the very object that he desires and that is the black man and his “primitive charms.”  So I think that’s what’s happening.  So Van Vechten as “victim” has here been willingly trapped in the net of the primitive and has penetrated and lifted the veil simultaneously.  So he’s a willing participant in his capture, based on his apparent lack of resistance on his part, seems like he wants to be captured there, so in order for Van Vechten to enjoy and legitimize his status as both victim and master, he gets and he goes primitive through these photographs.  Again, it’s that whole idea of slumming.  In fact, Jimmy Durante, remember the performer Jimmy Durante?  He actually wrote that in terms of Harlem, he actually wrote, you know, you sort of go primitive up there.  He wrote that!  So to me, this is exactly what is happening.  Instead of going primitive up there, which Van Vechten could do, he also did it in his darkroom in terms of these images.  So he partakes here in all of those base pleasures erotic impulses that imaginary encounters with the black man had to offer.  So this becomes very interesting in that respect, and I’m sure there’s a lot of questioning about that.  Could we go to the next two slides, please.  I just want to hurry up. 

Van Vechten also created these interesting works in which both figures, the black and white model, are laying a kiss upon an African head, so they’re both embracing--the whole idea of embracing Africa.  That both races are embracing Africa is very interesting.  It’s interesting to note how he decided on this backdrop versus that backdrop there on the left.  The whole issue of patterning and skin color and this juxtaposition seems very interesting in terms of this figure’s darker--this juxtaposition of contrast between white and darkness here, the sort of even tonality there on the left.  These images are very interesting in that they recall or bring up the whole idea of Salome, the whole idea of the severed head of Salome--and the reason I mention that is because the iconography was indeed very familiar to Van Vechten who, as a theater critic, was very familiar with Salome, the performances of Salome, during the 1920s, the 1930s and the 1940s.  In fact, he actually reviewed in 1906, as theater critic for the New York Times, when Theadore Dreiser was the editor of Broadway Magazine, he was actually commissioned to write a piece on Richard Strauss’ then controversial opera, Salome.  So he was familiar with that.  Also, there were other performances in New York that would not have escaped his notice, for example, we know in 1923 Salome was performed at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem and also at the Frazie Theater on Broadway by an interracial little theater group called The Ethiopian Players and, as was to be the case with Van Vechten’s photography years later, that interracial theatrical performance was intended to foster mutual understanding between the races, and that’s why they did it.  But more pertinent to the discussion here is the fact that Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome, was staged in 1929 by an African-American choreographer and dancer whose name was Hemsley Winfield who caused a sensation when he himself danced the role of Salome at the Greenwich Village Cherry Lane Theater in drag.  So his drag performance as Salome in an all-black cast accomplished what these images ultimately set out to do, and that is to confront and transgress the boundaries of erotic and racial representation while also focusing attention on the larger issues of gender and modernity as well.  So these are very interesting works in that respect.  Could we go forward please?

In the outdoor series you saw earlier, there is a very interesting photograph of the black male figure who is shown attached to a tree, and there are arrows supposedly piercing him and, of course, this is the Saint Sebastian story that’s being told, but here the arrows have been reduced to two arrows put on either side of his genitals here, and the figure of course is in an ecstatic sort of posture and position.  Now Susan Gubar, a scholar, has actually interpreted this image in a very, what I consider to be, a very hetero-sexualized way, and she suggests here that the “V” of the arrows there stands for Venus, for vagina, and that the black man’s joy at being penetrated, and Van Vechten’s sort of thrill and abilities at being able to shoot him in this state, gives me a very different impression here.  The “V” here isn’t for vagina or Venus but it convinces me, what the “V” there is for, it’s symbolic of Van Vechten’s victory.  Van Vechten’s triple victory (Laughter) over things interracial, over things camp, homoerotic, and least that we think that Van Vechten only performed such an act on the body of a black man, it should be  noted that the white model was also photographed in the same position.  I don’t have a slide of it, but the white figure was photographed in the exact same way.  However, this image of course, brings up the very real issue of lynching.  The very real and serious notion of the black body as brutalized, as brutalized historically.  So that is a very serious issue.  I actually don’t think Van Vechten was thinking about that, but nonetheless, when we look at that today, that is indeed what we think of there.

Audience:  Wouldn’t that be a bigger turn-on?  That trans-aggressive kind of violent kind of . . .

Smalls:  Yeah, it could be.  For Van Vechten yes, it could be.  That’s something, here again, for some people that would be absolutely horrifying and frightening, but at the same time, when you think about it, S&M is frightening and horrifying.  There are a lot of things about it that can be a turn on.  That can be brutalizing but also erotic and a turn on.  I agree with you.  And this is the ambiguity of these images, the problematics of these kinds of things.  Yes, things can be racist, but when things are also erotic, what do you do with that?  Are you going to police someone’s fantasies?  Are you going to say, “You can’t fantasize about that?”  Well, if you tell someone you can’t fantasize about that, that’s exactly what they’re going to do even more.  So the idea of policing one’s fantasies, and that whole political correctness, you can’t correct those things.  So what do you do?  What do you do with that?  So this is one of those issues that comes up.  Really, what do you do about that?  Think about that in terms of, for example, there are stories about that, for example, Jews who are attracted to Nazi’s in fantasy.  What do you do with that?  It’s a reality of the fantasy and if you have artwork that explicitly reveals that fantasy, how are you going to deal with that?  Are you going to just condemn it and say that person was bad in fantasizing that?  Or, what do you do?  It becomes a very problematic kind of issue.  I think these images bring that up.  Here on the right, a very dark image, but nonetheless the whole idea of the black man with his trophy, white trophy, hanging from the tree, willingly, of course.  The primitive of course who has captured the white man, is going to cannibalize him, and also sodomize him.  It’s very interesting that cannibalizing and sodomizing, when you look at Freud, he equates those two thinks.  To sodomize and cannibalize are in fact identical in psychoanalytic parlance.  So that’s a very interesting connection here that one could think about in reference to this work as well.  Also, even though it might reverse, or it might seemingly give the black man power, it also is racist in its idea that the black man is being very primitivist, being very savage.  Even though he’s not the one being lynched here, nonetheless you do have that problematic that we were talking about--the notion of power, giving power to the black man.  The idea that if you give power, you’ve already negated the actual power.  Can we go forward?

Oh, I was going to indicate that interestingly, one of the interesting things that Hazel Carby has done is that she has written about primarily the art works of F. Holland Day and also Nicholas Murray and talks about--of course they are by F. Holland Day from his Nubian series of the late 19^th century.  What he’s done is he’s combined the idea of the primitive and aestheticizes that by putting on top of that idea of the primitive on the black man in this particular instances, those classical notions, those western European aesthetisizing and classisizing those notions, and Hazel Carby notes that doing this is meant to neutralize the presence of the black body.  In other words, the black body in social reality.  That threatening body is neutralized here.  This way the black body can be consumed because the black person can’t look back.  He’s basically pacified in this use.  If you think about this in reference to Van Vechten’s work, this style, the pictorialist style was way out of fashion by the time Van Vechten was producing his images and this kind of thing was out of fashion.  But nevertheless it’s a very interesting exercise to compare and contrast what Van Vechten was doing with those images where you saw the zebra carpet and these kinds of images.  Van Vechten does not use any of that western European aesthetisizing that people liked.  However, it is important to point out, and here is one of those contradictions again, that indeed, the black body has been brutalized and it has been brutalized historically.  So to look at black images, images of black males produced by white modernists, problems are going to arise.  If the white modernist is visualizing the black male form, you could either aesthetisize it by using these classical sources in which you’re criticized for doing that or you could primitivize like Van Vechten and also be criticized for that.  So it’s very interesting that that becomes a very significant issue and as far as I know, even today, very few white artists depict the black male or female form for this very fear that there’s going to be that kind of problem.  Could we go forward again please?  I’m almost done.

These are other F. Holland Day’s from his Ebony and Ivory series.  The whole idea of the primitive neutralized by the western European classical, juxtaposing that with that sort of very familiar post.  That, by the way of course, Mapplethorpe has taken and used that as well.  Can you go forward?

These are by George Platte Lynes and I’m just pointing out some very interesting things that photographers had done in terms of the interracial.  When you think about the homoerotic and the interracial, some very interesting things occur.  Kobena Mercer who has written a lot about this kind of material has asked the question, what is it in that interracial juxtaposition that attracts the eye.  In other words, black against white. What is it that’s attractive about that?  Is it just that formal attraction or is it because black and white and those visuals create ideas about the signs that those things represent?  What does white represent?  What does black represent?  That that might be at issue.  He doesn’t resolve it, he just brings that whole notion up.  These are by George Platt Lynes, again using very classisizing and Western-European notions of beauty and form to juxtapose black and white.  Go forward please.

There’s Mapplethorpe.  That’s Mapplethorpe there on the right.  You can see the whole idea of the aesthetisized and the primitivized put together as sort of whole issue of neutralizing.  Forward please.  Then there are black diasporic artists, contemporary artists, who have decided to light upon the black body and in many cases it’s their own bodies in order deal with issues of race and gender and self-representation and indulgence. These are both works by Adjahmu who is a black British artist photographer of Nigerian origin.  This is a self-portrait here on the right.  That work there is Body Builder in a Bra.  I think that’s him if I’m not mistaken, as well.  This idea of the black man visualizing his own body, and sort of objectifying himself and his own body and his own pleasure.  Adjahmu is very interesting in that he reverses that idea of the black male as a sort of phallic black monster and reverses that and concentrates a lot on the anal.  So the idea of the phallic versus the anal, he really is very interested in doing that, primarily with his own body.  Go forward please.

That, of course, you’re familiar with, and I wanted to juxtapose that with the Adjahmu but the whole idea of the artists--the self-portrait.  Go forward please.

Artists such as Rotini Fani Coyote, who uses the whole idea of Nigerian cosmology, notions of modernist primitivism and also the self, the body, to evoke very, very important, very significant ideas about identity, about black maleness, about homoeroticism, about interracialism because Rotini Fani Coyote  had a white lover as well.  Then on the right we have a black sculpture during the time of Van Vechten who also concentrated on the black body and eroticized the black body.  It’s interesting that nobody condemns Barte, an African-American sculpture, for eroticizing the black male form, but if you were a white artist he would be much criticized for this kind of thing.  So it’s interesting that he deals with the whole idea of the primitive and the whole idea of the classical, because it’s sort of Michaelangilesque and also S-shaped form, but then the primitive sort of action that is going on is very interesting.  By the way, just an aside, this is actually a person who is a dancer and who is actually a counterpart to Josephine Baker.  He was actually a very eroticized and sexualized kind of dancer who groomed himself that way and was gay and knew Barte, knew Van Vechten, in fact he was photographed by Van Vechten as well.  Go forward please.

Again, these are by Rotini Fani Coyote here on the right and that is by Robert Taylor.  Go forward please.  He is very interested in this whole idea of the interracial and the homoerotic.  Has some very interesting photographs related to that.  The reason I’m bringing all of this up is that one could see, from Van Vechten, what could carry this to contemporary and see what artists are doing in terms of ideas of the interracial and the homoerotic.  I think that’s it.  I could show you a lot more.

(Applause)

There are a lot more issues, dealing with issues of spectatorship and issues of dealing with the whole idea of--oh, you have a question.

Audience:  As you got closer to the images, I look at him as a young black male.  The images of the young black male, the single ones with the mask and the veil, is he a young black male?

Smalls:  He’s young. 

Audience:  Have you ever been questioned about that because it seems like maybe he doesn’t know how he’s been depicted in these images.  Has that been brought up? 

Smalls:  That’s true, that’s true.

Audience:  That’s what I was having a problem with when I started seeing those images.

Smalls:  You’re right.  In fact, the demeanor of the young black man is as if he were, in fact, coerced into these scenarios.  It seems like he seemingly had no sort of choice to do so.  However, I do know that Richman Barte, the black sculpture, is the one who got that black model for Van Vechten.  This person traveled in those circles, in the dancers circles, and to make money he occasionally was a model for Richman Barte and also for Van Vechten.  But I think you’re right, he was--in fact, Barte in his letters mentions that he looks very stiff in these photographs.  So Barte actually saw Van Vechten’s photographs.  Because of that, I know that Barte, the black sculpture, saw some of these photographs because he thought he was very stiff and very resistant, in a way, to how he was depicted.  You’re right. 

Younger:  I guess that’s part of the question I had too, because it seemed like in his eyes there was no seduction, where you see that other white model was kissing the statue, he certainly had seduction in his face.  The other thing is that I felt like they weren’t ever touching each other either, it didn’t seem like there was any touch between the two models in Van Vechten’s work where you see it in some of the others. 

Smalls:  Oh, you mean in the later ones.

Younger:  Well you see it in all those other people’s work that there is touch, but in the earlier works there doesn’t seem to be any touch at all, or seduction in a sense.  It seemed like it was just Van Vechten in the view, but certainly not in the eyes of those people.

Smalls:  The idea of juxtaposing and proximity was probably just enough, that he thought, to stimulate the sort of seduction, I don’t know.

Audience:  One of the things I was curious about and that is audience and spectatorship that you were talking about, but one thing that I had a question about that I feel is critical is, what is the print quality of those images by comparison to the other images by Van Vechten because as we looked at them you mentioned that one was very dark, another one you were referring to in terms of its tonality, and I wonder if that was consistent with some of his other work.

Smalls:  Right.  With the public works, the works that we’re familiar with, yes, he was very interested in tonalities and patterns and the backdrops, the props that the people would have.  Oh, he studied those very, very carefully.

Audience:  The reason why I’m asking that is I’m curious about whether or not the slides were fairly representative of the print quality in those images.

Smalls:  Actually, the slides are a little bit better.

Audience:  Then that would give me the kind of question.  The quality of those images, in terms of whether or not they were really meant to be public or private images, and just thinking about a photographer’s perspective in terms of work print and private imagery.

Smalls: Right, right.  I got the sense that they working.  They were not intended for public display.  The way they were stored, the way I got them when I opened them up, indicated that.  They were not precious little objects.  They were experiments, basically, in terms of what he believed.

Audience:  I was curious if they were good enough for their intended use.

Smalls:  Oh, yeah.  I think so.  The images--how large were they?  They’re 8x10 and some are a little larger, they varied in size, but they were 8x10 generally.

Audience:  Did he say absolutely nothing about these?  There was no archived information?

Smalls:  He said, “Here are 13 boxes.  They are sealed.  I don’t want you to open these until 1989.”  The man who took them said, “What’s in them?”  And he said, “Some very private things.”  (End of tape)

Smalls Analysis

by Danny Yahav-Brown

Carl Van Vechten, a patron of the arts in New York from the 1920s to 1940s as well as a music, dance, and theater critic with the New York Times, produced thousands of photographs depicting African-American culture, mainly within the vicinity of Harlem. Van Vechten’s public photos dealt mainly with portraits of African American celebrities, but created a different body of work privately. His private work depicted interrelationships between black and white men in highly erotic imagery. As a personality of many faces Van Vechten kept his private work to himself. By his instructions, the photos were aired only after his death in 1964.

In his presentation, John Smalls claimed that these photographs could serve as a reliable social representation of racial and homoerotic subtext. Smalls suggested viewing the relationships between primitivism (Africa) and modernism (the West) as a key for understanding Van Vechten’s project. From Smalls’ perspective the avant-garde appropriation of African objects and rituals, was part of a common belief that African-American culture, as opposed to white culture, has been able to preserve its true essence. Smalls described a voyeuristic system of interracial homoeroticism, a mechanism that provides white gay men with control over the black body. However, as Smalls argued, seeing Van Vechten’s enterprise only through this prism will undermine its complexity.  These homoerotic interracial representations, according to Smalls, are always in a flux, allowing Van Vechten to transgress identities, positions and roles. Smalls highlighted the use of African masks in some of the photos.  Van Vechten’s interest in the “primitive” within the theatrical space have sometimes been linked to Freudian ideas of castration, anxiety and fetishism. Smalls concluded that Van Vechten’s subjects can be perceived as an emblem of “fetish and fantasy”, underscoring the idea that “pleasure and cultural or political agendas are being played out on all sides.”