V
CARL VAN VECHTEN
American
Carl Van Vechten was in his fifties when he began
his career as a photographer. His photographic work
consists almost entirely of black-and-white portraits,
mostly of celebrities and prominent African-Ameri-
cans. His previous careers as an art critic and nove-
list brought him into contact with the creative people
who would become the subjects of his photographs.
He was a major force in bringing recognition to the
Harlem Renaissance. Although he rarely showed his
work and never accepted a fee for a sitting, his many
gifts to various libraries have become a valuable
pictorial record of twentieth-century culture.
Van Vechten was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in
- He grew up in an upper-middle-class family
that valued education, the arts, and social reform.
His father helped found the Piney Woods School, a
primary and secondary school for African-American
children in rural Mississippi. Van Vechten himself
would later support the school. In his youth, he
experimented with a box camera, but his artistic
interests gravitated more towards music and theater.
He pursued these interests as a student at the Uni-
versity of Chicago, where he published fiction, pro-
duced plays, and volunteered as an extra for traveling
opera companies. He also frequented the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra, whose conductor, Theodore
Thomas, performed contemporary orchestral music
long before most other American conductors.
After graduation, Van Vechten remained in Chi-
cago for three years as a beat reporter for William
Randolph Hearst’sChicago American. Among his
duties there was to collect photographs for the
newspaper; his professional career before age 50
offers no other hint of his future occupation. In
1906, he moved to New York, whereThe New
York Times soon hired him as an assistant to
music critic Richard Aldrich. Van Vechten’s back-
ground in contemporary music and theater nicely
complemented the interests of Aldrich, whose tastes
were quite traditional and conservative. Aldrich
happily relegated to Van Vechten all reviews of
performances that did not interest him; as a result,
Van Vechten soon met most of the important fig-
ures in avant-garde opera and music. During his
seven years atThe New York Times, Van Vechten
gradually expanded his critical range. He renewed
his interest in theater, and became the first dance
critic writing for an American newspaper. He al-
so served a year (1908–1909) as theTimes’sParis
correspondent, a position which required him to
cover all beats and exposed him to post-impressio-
nist painting.