Existing comment:
The arts were Carl Van Vechten's life and African American culture was his passion. He met the writer and NAACP undercover agent Walter White in 1925; White introduced him to artists and activists of the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten immersed himself in African American literature, art, and poetry, devouring books by day and visiting Harlem by night. He initiated what would become a decades-long correspondence with the central figures of the movement, many of whom he later photographed.
For Van Vechten, photography was a way of participating in modernist culture. He did not set out to make a document of the African American community, and that is what makes his portraits so singular. He photographed well-known figures of American modernism including such writers as Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston and dancers Claude Marchant and Rose McClendon, as well as rising stars like the singers Ruby Elzy and Altonell Hines; some of these portraits would ultimately be chosen for the portfolio Noble Black Women. He created a truly inclusive portrait of America at a time when exclusion was the norm. Among his contemporaries, Carl Van Vechten was unique for his broad reach and rejection of social restrictions. His portraiture constitutes the most comprehensive photographic vision of American arts and letters in the middle years of the twentieth century. |