Across 110th Street
Fig. 1. Portrait of Cab Calloway [1907–1994] by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), c. 1933. Except as noted, the images illustrated are from Van Vechten’s 8-by- 10-inch negatives (scanned and digitally reversed). All objects illustrated are in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection. Fig. 2. Portrait of Langston Hughes [c. 1902–1967], 1936.Fig. 3. Portrait of Ethel Waters [1896–1977], 1938. Long before celebrity was quite what it is today, capturing the faces of the accomplished— whether for the private enjoyment of the sitter, for public exhibition, or as illustrations for newspapers and, later, magazines— has been central to photographic practice. Years before he chronicled the carnage of the Civil War, Mathew Brady was shooting the likes of Thomas Cole, John James Audubon, and Daniel Webster. Beginning in 1910, Alfred Stieglitz turned his lens on his own circle—Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove, among others. By the time Henry Luce’s Life landed on coffee tables in 1936, the celebrity image was a staple of our visual culture. The roster of photographers whose portraits comprise a pantheon of the twentieth century’s leading artists and intellects includes Yousuf Karsh, Arnold Newman, George Hurrell, Cecil Beaton, and Philippe Halsman. Arguably less well known today is writer and critic Carl Van Vechten, a son of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who emerged as something of a celebrity photographer in the New York City of the 1920s (Fig. 4). He shot a range of individuals, from established talents—Ethel Barrymore, Theodore Dreiser—to rising stars such as Aaron Copland and Orson Welles (Fig. 8). As Carl Van Vechten: Man about Town—an exhibition on view at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art—suggests, it seemed no one of note escaped his attention. Fig. 4. Portrait of Carl Van Vechten (self-portrait), 1934. Fig. 5. Portrait of