just jolly
James
Smalls The Homoerotic Photography of
Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2006)
Compared with modern male nude
photography, such as the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and certainly when
compared with contemporary gay pornography—an area which, at times, this body
of work approaches— the Van Vechten photographs are generally quite tame,
showing both models in various poses, some suggesting sexual interactions, but
mostly alternating roles of subservience and power. A moments the Black figure
appears to dominate the white, and a few of the photographs play with masks and
issues of bondage, the white enwrapped, in one work, in a white muslin sheet,
and in another the Black figure wearing it as a kind of headdress. There are
also a few posed tableaus that remind one somewhat of Wilhelm Von Gloeden and
other late 19th and early 20th century photographers of
the male nude—one in which the white figure is serving the Black tea, another
in which the Black figure is presenting grapes to the pleading
white figure,
and a couple of which play with the positioning of held globes of light—that
seem, in their narrative expression— in opposition with the other, often more
experimental nature of this art.
Using theoretical discussions by many of the
well known late 20th-century critical theorists and psychologists,
Smalls assesses Van Vechten’s art in the context of all the issues it might
suggest, including Black essentialism by white society, fetishism, sadomasochism,
and pre-Stonewall homosexual aestheticism. It is clear that one might, indeed,
“accuse” Van Vechten of any of these positions if he so wanted to. But the
question on which Smalls finally focuses is based on the difference between who
is viewing and through what lens, and what Van Vechten, who did not intend them
for public viewing, meant them to be. Smalls argues, in the end:
I believe that these photographic scenarios
were born out of Van
Vechten’s urgent social
desire to legitimate and satisfy his fixation
on black culture and to
simultaneously appease the need to vent
homoerotic desires. As such,
they were extremely significant for
defining and maintaining Van Vechten’s
psychological link to a
public
social life. By focusing in on the homoerotic and on racial
distinction within a highly artificial and
contrived atmosphere of
harmonious solemnity and implied
sadomasochistic acts, images
such as these heighten a sense of white
capitulation in racial co-
operation between the races. The social
and the erotic/sexual are
effectively linked to fantasy. In
pushing the theme of utopic in-
terracial harmony in ritualizes
gestures and mock settings, Van
Vechten’s photographs succeed at
playing on a conflicted fusion
of power, fear, and desire.
Los Angeles,
April 6, 2014
Reprinted
in Green Integer Blog (April 2014).
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