Color Portraits by Carl Van Vechten

A new digital initiative at the Beinecke Library will scan several thousand color slides of portraits of notable African Americans by photographer Carl Van Vechten. The images, hundreds of which are already available, will be added to the Beinecke’s Digital Library. Carl Van Vechten’s black and white photographs of African American poets, playwrights, musicians, dancers, artists, thinkers, and others are well known and highly regarded. Because he didn’t print his color photographs, however, these images have never been widely viewed and are publicly available now for the first time.

Carl Van Vechten was a popular novelist and a respected music and dance critic decades before he began photographing his friends and acquaintances in the 1930s. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance and he counted Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston among his closest friends. Van Vechten was a founder of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters at Yale University; at his urging, many African American writers and artists gave manuscripts and archival materials to the collection in Johnson’s honor. When he began taking photographs, Van Vechten set out to document the important figures of the African American literary and artistic communities.

The color slides in the Beinecke’s collection reveal new aspects of Van Vechten’s artistic vision as a photographer. Van Vechten claimed Henri Matisse as an important influence; it is clear from viewing his portraits in color that, in selecting his signature backdrops, Van Vechten was inspired by the painter’s often bright color palate and bold use of patterning.

In addition to his portraits of Harlem Renaissance figures, the Beinecke’s collection of Van Vechten’s photographic prints includes his portraits of important Modernist writers (such as Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore), figures in the American theater community (such as Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell), the international ballet (such as Nora Kaye and Sono Osato), Hollywood luminaries (such as Lillian Gish and Hedda Hopper) among many many others. A description of the collection is on line: Van Vechten Photographs Preliminary List. The photographer’s correspondence with many of his subjects and others as well as manuscripts of his writings are also in the Beinecke’s collections: Carl Van Vechten Manuscript Survey and Carl Van Vecthen Correspondence Preliminary List. An exhibition of portraits of women from the Van Vechten collection can be viewed on line: Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten’s Portraits of Women.

Additional related materials can be found in numerous Beinecke collections by searching the Finding Aid Database; recently acquired materials may be found in the Uncataloged Acquisitions Database. Carl Van Vechten’s books in the Yale Libraries can be located by searching Orbis, the library catalog.

Images: Pearl Bailey, 1946; Marian Anderson, 1940; Harold Jackman in Morningside Park, 1940; Katherine Dunham, 1940, in color and black and white; Leontyne Price, 1951; Ella Fitzgerald, 1940; W.E.B DuBois, 1946; James Baldwin, 1955; Diahann Carroll and Carl Van Vechten, 1955 , photographed by Saul Mauriber.

All photographs by Carl Van Vechten are used with permission of the Van Vechten Trust; the permission of the Trust is required to reprint or use Van Vechten photographs in any way. To contact the Trust email: Van Vechten Trust.

Call for Papers: Photographic Proofs

Photographic Proofs, A Graduate Student Conference

“A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.” – Susan Sontag

 

“But the proof of the pictures was in the reading. The photographs had to have their status as truth produced and institutionally sanctioned.” – John Tagg

The Yale University Photographic Memory Working Group, in conjunction with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, invites submissions for a graduate student conference entitled “Photographic Proofs.” The Conference will be held at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, Friday-Saturday, April 4-5, 2008. The theme of this conference should be interpreted broadly. Papers could be theoretical, historical, or critical explorations based on one photograph or a collection of photographs. They might interrogate the theme of photographic proofs from one of many different angles, including documentary, artistic, commercial, and vernacular photography. Selected sets of photographs may relate to war, science, medicine, race, class, law, business, reform, the natural and built environment, frontiers, performance, gender, sexuality, or family, among other subjects.

In order to engender an inter-disciplinary community and to further challenge and develop the vocabulary that surrounds photographic criticism, we encourage submissions from graduate students at all stages of their studies, working in any discipline. The Beinecke Library will add to this discussion by hosting a workshop for conference participants highlighting the library’s extensive photographic holdings.

We are pleased to announce that Professor John Tagg will deliver the opening keynote address. John Tagg is Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. His books, which often focus on the relationship between photography and power, include The Burden of Representation: Essays of Photographies and Histories, Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field, and the forthcoming The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Regimens and the Capture of Meaning.

In an effort to foster a geographically diverse community of graduate student presenters, we are pleased to be able to cover travel and accommodation expenses for students whose papers are selected.

Email CVs and abstracts to photographic.proofs@yale.edu by Monday, October 15. Abstracts should be under 300 words. Final papers should not exceed 20 minutes in length. We will notify selected speakers by December 15. The conference website can be found at: www.photographicproofs.com.

Co-organizers: Alice Moore and Francesca Ammon, graduate students in American Studies.

Some of the Beinecke Library’s rich photographic resources can be viewed by searching the Beinecke Digital Library. Important photograph collections in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection include the James Weldon Johnson Photographs of Blacks collections (descriptions available in Orbis), the Randolph Linsley Simpson Collection, Carl Van Vechten’s Portraits, and photograph collections found in the papers of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.

Image: Literary conference at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College, Normal, Alabama, Autumn, 1966. From the Langston Hughes Papers.