Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was perhaps the most notorious white patron of the arts of black America, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1932, he gave up a career as a theater critic and a novelist of light fiction to become a full-time amateur photographer. His photographs of the era's celebrated African American cultural figures are well-known, but until recently his private, homoerotic interracial photographs were sealed in an archive. Author James Smalls considers how these images relate to Van Vechten's public persona and private desires. He discusses the interracial photographs in the context of white privilege and exotic tourism, primitivism's relation to modernism, camp sensibility and theatricality, and the vibrancy of underground gay visual culture during periods of political oppression. He also considers contemporary viewers' conflicting responses to the eroticized black male body in Van Vechten's and later twentieth-century photography. This original and provocative book embraces transracial voyeuristic pleasure while acknowledging the negative political implications of that pleasure. Amply illustrated with 60 pioneering duotones, The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten celebrates the sensual nude male form with both candor and reverence, offering a rare glimpse into the private domain of the master photographer and his handsome subjects.

James Smalls is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art.

"James Smalls offers an original, provocative, thoughtful and necessary analysis of interracial homoerotic fetish and fantasy. His writing is well balanced and his argument considers how the images operate psychologically and socially during the historical moment of the Harlem Renaissance and during the present day. The book is an invaluable text in black studies, queer studies and the Harlem Renaissance."—Mark A. Reid, author of Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now

"I don't believe Smalls has left any important stones unturned in this study; I felt that the text was chock full of information and rich interconnections among its components."—Deborah Bright, Rhode Island School of Design