Generations in Black and White: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection.

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) had an early career as an influential critic and a lucrative second career as a popular novelist, but he is more likely to be remembered as a gifted amateur photographer of celebrated people in the arts. During the last thirty years of his long life, this hobby embraced a passionate mission: to document with his Leica camera all African Americans of public significance, a range broad enough to have included everybody from W. E. B. Du Bois to Sammy Davis, Jr. Van Vechten began in 1932 with his close friend James Weldon Johnson, then in the prime of his distinguished career; just before Van Vechten died, at the age of eighty-four, he was negotiating to photograph a teenaged Andre Watts, then just poised on the brink of his own distinguished career.

Now Professor Rudolph P. Byrd, who directs the program in African American Studies at Emory University, has edited a generous selection from this rich archive in Generations in Black and White, faithfully reproduced from new prints prepared from Van Vechten's original negatives in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The subjects are accompanied by Byrd's biographical summaries of their professional lives, each one as crisply written as the next, and most of them luminously informative.

When Carl Van Vechten escaped from Iowa to go to college, he took along an interesting background for his future careers. Cedar Rapids, his home town, had been the first stop west of Chicago for all the traveling theater troupes and vaudeville shows, including African American companies. Because Sissieretta Jones often appeared there with her Black Patti Troubadours, Van Vechten had been smitten, even before the turn of the century, and in Chicago when he heard ragtime music and saw the comic genius of Bert Williams and his cake-walking partner George Walker. Subsequently, as music and drama critic for various newspapers as well as an independent journalist for magazines, an enthusiastic Van Vechten may have been the first white writer to offer serious attention to black entertainers and entertainments.

Later he turned to fiction, and by 1924, when he began to meet African Americans socially, he had written four chic, urbane, and faintly risque novels, all of them successful. If the twenties didn't exactly roar in his social circle, they sang lustily enough in their own key, and always with racially mixed guest lists at his parties. It wasn't long before the influential black activist Walter White dubbed Van Vechten's apartment "The Midtown Office of the NAACP," and with good reason. In addition to its white face, the jazz age had a black one in the so-called "Harlem Renaissance," even though that "renaissance" was going on all over the country as young African American artists and writers found their voices. Van Vechten's proselytizing for them began about the same time, with a series of essays in the influential magazine Vanity Fair about the blues and the spirituals, about their interpreters, and about the need for a black theater with black playwrights. He wrote, too, to urge young black poets and novelists to begin writing about life in contemporary Harlem in all of its aspects. Since, by that time, he numbered among his intimate friends many of the people he would later photograph, it is not surprising that Harlem's intelligentsia affectionately dubbed him the first Negrotarian.

But in 1926, when Van Vechten's fifth novel attempted to reflect his enthusiasm through a vast cross-section of Harlem life, not even the support of several influential black intellectuals overcame a powerful backlash to his having told what many had regarded as "family secrets," as novelist Nella Larsen put it. Further, the title - Nigger Heaven - was inflammatory, destined to offend blacks and whites alike. Van Vechten's reputation as a sybaritic dilettante and as a writer of resolutely frivolous novels didn't help, even though this book was deadly serious. The title was ironic, intended as a familiar reference to the balcony in segregated theaters, and fully explained as a metaphor for Harlem itself in segregated Manhattan north of 125th Street. Moreover, the book was entirely sympathetic to its subject and even supplied a footnote to explain the invidious word in the title.

During the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois condemned it and James Weldon Johnson praised it; ever since then, it has provoked similar disagreement. "It was the opinion of some of the most astute critics of African American culture," Byrd says in his otherwise fair-minded introduction, "that the novel celebrated only the most unsavory and unseemly aspects of African American life and, its flattering portrait of the black middle class notwithstanding, failed to suggest the diversity of African American life as it emerged with all its force and beauty in Harlem." By actual page count, about a third of the novel takes place in Harlem's steamy cabarets and bedrooms; the rest of Nigger Heaven is devoted to a passionate series of sociological discussions about the plight of African Americans, and to a passionless love affair between the earnest but essentially vapid hero and heroine. As in every other Van Vechten novel, the nice characters are boring and the naughty ones are fascinating. I wish that Byrd had addressed this contradiction more directly, but he does rightly observe that, had "Van Vechten chosen a less sensational title, Nigger Heaven would have passed into the obscurity of his other novels, and his patronage of African American culture would be more widely known and appreciated."

In 1926, however, the book sparked a literary storm on both sides of the racial barrier at 125th Street, and there were mixed results from all the publicity: The market strengthened for black subject matter, which caused a number of young African American writers to be taken up by white publishers, often with Van Vechten's endorsements; also, however, hordes of white thrill-seekers invaded Harlem to go slumming in its cabarets and speakeasies. That brought a lot of money into Harlem, but it perpetuated more Jim Crow places like the Cotton Club, where all the patrons were white and all the performers were black. Then, when the stock market crashed, the vogue for "The New Negro" - a popular phrase at the time - faded in a hurry. Van Vechten's loyalty never faltered, however, as his subsequent photography proved.

In 1932 he became fascinated with possibilities of the Leica camera, just then being introduced in the United States, and gave up writing in its favor. Although he experimented with over- and underexposing his images, and with pulling and burning them for contrast, he never retouched any of his prints, nor did he ever crop them radically. Eventually his work became almost resolutely documentary, although he always said he didn't see any reason that it couldn't be beautiful, too. But Van Vechten could be his own worst enemy in the darkroom when he was eager to share his latest efforts with friends and sometimes failed to wash his prints free of their chemicals. As a result, many of his own silver gelatin prints have severely deteriorated.

Unlike most photographers, he made finished prints of nearly every picture he took. When most people recall the Yousuf Karsh portraits of Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway, or even the portraits of Carl Van Vechten himself by Man Ray or Berenice Abbott, they usually know of a single image in each case. Contrarily, there are about twenty Van Vechten portraits of Bessie Smith, all made during a single sitting, several of which have been reproduced; about forty of Marian Anderson during a midnight-to-dawn marathon session with some costume changes; probably that many of Paul Robeson and of Langston Hughes from several sittings over the years; and well over 100 portraits of Ethel Waters. The variety, for all its interest, leads to a lot of unevenness. Van Vechten claimed that he threw out "anything that isn't perfection"; even so, there are better and worse portraits of nearly every subject in his catalog.

Several years ago, Richard A. Benson and the Eakins Press prepared a hundred sets of fifty photographs of Van Vechten's African American subjects, pulled from the original negatives by copper gravure, some of them rivaling Van Vechten's own best prints. These have been widely exhibited in many museums in America and, sponsored by the State Department, in several African countries as well. Wisely, Byrd has chosen equally handsome but different photographs than those in the Eakins Press portfolio; also, in the case of subjects endlessly reproduced, like Bessie Smith and Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, he has chosen shots never before reproduced or exhibited. Although Van Vechten did most of his work in the studio in his apartment, against appropriate backdrops, Byrd has included some rare al fresco shots: a serene Bricktop at Place Pigalle; a troubled Countee Cullen in Central Park; a very young Lena Horne at Joe Louis's training camp, caught seemingly in motion. And there are some surprises: Aaron Douglas photographed against the colorful murals he had painted on the walls of Van Vechten's bathroom in 1927; Ralph Bunche, the first African American Nobel Peace Prize winner; Cab Calloway, quiet as a still-life and a strong contrast to Van Vechten's better-known hi-de-ho pictures of him; Diahann Carroll at eighteen; Amiri Baraka - then LeRoi Jones - at the time his first book was published.

Byrd's eighty-three photographs offer a substantial representation of Van Vechten's output, although at least an additional four dozen subjects might have been included. Some of these are serious omissions, in my view, but the economics of publication may have controlled the final count. I regret the absence of some superb Van Vechten photographs: singers Carol Brice and Dorothy Maynor, whose early careers made the going easier for Reri Grist and Shirley Verrett, none of whom is represented; Harlem's gifted young jazz-age photographer James Allen; popular performers Gladys Bentley and Elisabeth Welch; writers Owen Dodson and Willard Motley; sculptor Augusta Savage; actors Diana Sands and Roscoe Lee Browne. The excellence of Byrd's choices inspires greed for more.

Even a cursory perusal will verify some unmistakable elements in almost any Van Vechten photograph. Art critic Henry McBride's mid-thirties' observation that Van Vechten was "the Bronzino of this camera period" held true from the first portraits to the last ones: first, light, often in startling contrast; then, a predilection for the silvery profile, the pensive stare more often than the friendly smile; finally, the background profusion of pattern and color, almost invariably a reflection of the sitter's profession or personality. "Photography's a very personal thing," Van Vechten said, perhaps speaking for the sitter as well as the photographer. In the catalog for an extensive exhibition currently on tour throughout the country, Keith Davis rightly observes that Carl Van Vechten's photographs "combine historical and expressive intentions in a uniquely compelling way by consistently blurring the distinction between documentary and interpretive concerns . . . with a wholly original combination of style and passion" (The Passionate Observer [Kansas City: Hallmark, 1993], 32).

That "style and passion" continued until Van Vechten died, for by his last will and testament any income ever realized from his writing or his photography goes to the endowment fund of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University, arguably the most valuable repository of its kind for scholars and students of African American culture. Van Vechten founded it, using his own collection as a nucleus, in 1941, when Yale had no African American materials whatsoever; as usual, he had been ahead of his time. Rudolph Byrd's Generations in Black and White offers ample evidence, sufficiently handsome to hold down coffee tables and sufficiently scholarly for libraries.