Carl Van Vechten, Billie Holiday, 1949, Kodachrome slide, digitally reformatted
“Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939 – 1964”
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
121 Wall St.
Through June 30.
Here is Billie Holiday in tears, sitting for a white man photographing people of color, in color. No other of the series of portraits on view here is so clearly charged with emotion. There is laughter in several images, but it reads as carefully staged, as all these photographs were. According to Carl Van Vechten’s own account, Holiday sat for him only once during the course of a single evening in March, 1949. In an attempt to ease what was apparently an uncomfortable session, he showed her some photos that he had taken of Bessie Smith. It was these which led to her crying, and to her agreement to wrap herself in a piece of black fabric that became her costume for this picture. Van Vechten shot a sequence in black and white at the same time as he took these color slides, several of the latter showing her apparently naked, her arms across her breasts. None of those are included in this exhibition.
There is something of the secret diary to these color portraits. The sitters are self-consciously arranged in front of backdrops which Van Vechten constructed. Along with the political clarity of Ade Bethune and W.E. B. DuBois, there is a preponderance of male dancers, Alvin Ailey, Arthur Mitchell, and Geoffrey Holder prominent among them, and a preoccupied Joe Louis, all of them shirtless. One comes away from this collection with the feeling of having learned something one would have rather not, especially in this image of Holiday at its most revealing, and its most brutal.
Object Lesson #16
Object Lesson #15
Object Lesson #14
Object Lesson #13
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Object Lesson #9
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Object Lesson #7
Object Lessons #5 & #6
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Object Lesson#2
Object Lesson #1