Image above and below by Carl Van Vecht­en, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Amer­i­cans have long con­sid­ered New York City, at least dur­ing its rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive eras or in its rel­a­tive­ly expen­sive areas, a haven for every type of artist and mem­bers of all sub­cul­tures. The den­si­ty of its pop­u­la­tion, by Amer­i­can stan­dards, also presents its denizens with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cross between one artis­tic or sub­cul­tur­al realm and anoth­er with ease — or with geo­graph­i­cal ease, any­way. Few New York fig­ures crossed as many such bound­aries as cre­ative­ly in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry as a Cedar Rapids-born writer and pho­tog­ra­ph­er named Carl van Vecht­en.

“When Van Vecht­en first arrived in New York, in 1906, there were few signs that he would ever attempt to appoint him­self bard of Harlem,” writes Kele­fa San­neh in a New York­er piece on Van Vecht­en’s life. “He was a self-con­scious­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed exile from the Mid­west, and he was quick­ly hired by the Times as a music and dance crit­ic.” In addi­tion, to his crit­i­cism, “he also pub­lished a series of mis­chie­vous nov­els that were notable main­ly, one crit­ic observed, for their ‘annoy­ing man­ner­isms.’ ” (The crit­ic? Prob­a­bly the author him­self.) And the longer Van Vecht­en lived in New York, “the more inter­est­ed he became in the sights and sounds of Harlem, where rau­cous and inven­tive night clubs were thriv­ing under Pro­hi­bi­tion.”

The white Van Vecht­en wrote a nov­el about black life in Harlem, insist­ing on a title that I doubt I can even type here. It expressed what San­neh calls “his con­vic­tion that Negro cul­ture was the essence of Amer­i­ca,” which went with “his simul­ta­ne­ous fas­ci­na­tion with the avant-garde and the broad­ly pop­u­lar; and his string of sex­u­al rela­tion­ships with men, which were an open secret dur­ing his life. Van Vechten’s tastes were var­ied: his bib­li­og­ra­phy includes an eru­dite cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the house cat, and in his lat­er decades he became an accom­plished por­trait pho­tog­ra­ph­er.” Black, white, or oth­er­wise, near­ly every major fig­ure in the Amer­i­can cul­ture of the day seems to have sat for his cam­era: actors, writ­ers, musi­cians, intel­lec­tu­als, archi­tects, mag­nates, and many oth­er types besides.

Some of the sub­jects of Van Vecht­en’s over 9,000 por­traits, all brows­able online at Yale’s Bei­necke Rare Book and Man­u­script Library, were his friends: Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hugh­es, for instance, both of whom expressed great enthu­si­asm for Van Vecht­en’s writ­ing on black cul­ture. Oth­ers cre­at­ed that black cul­ture, now known as the Harlem Renais­sance: Dizzy Gille­spie, Bil­lie Hol­l­i­day, James Bald­win. Oth­ers made up the cul­ture of glob­al celebri­ty, then only in its infan­cy: Orson Welles, Lotte Ley­na, Lau­rence Olivi­er.

They, and more so Van Vecht­en him­self, knew that to become an icon in the 20th cen­tu­ry, you need­ed to do much more than excel in the human realm: you had to tran­scend it, ascend­ing into that of the image. If you suf­fi­cient­ly fas­ci­nat­ed Van Vecht­en, it seems, he was only too glad to help you on your way there. See thou­sands of his por­traits at this Yale web­site.

Por­traits in order of appear­ance on this page include: Bil­lie Hol­l­i­day, Orson Welles, James Bald­win, Gertrude Stein, and Dizzy Gille­spie. All come cour­tesy of the Van Vecht­en Col­lec­tion at Library of Con­gress.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 1932 Illus­trat­ed Map of Harlem’s Night Clubs: From the Cot­ton Club to the Savoy Ball­room

Dis­cov­er Langston Hugh­es’ Rent Par­ty Ads & The Harlem Renais­sance Tra­di­tion of Play­ing Gigs to Keep Roofs Over Heads

Andy Warhol’s 85 Polaroid Por­traits: Mick Jag­ger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simp­son & Many Oth­ers (1970–1987)

200,000 Pho­tos from the George East­man Muse­um, the World’s Old­est Pho­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion, Now Avail­able Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

We might draw any num­ber of con­clu­sions from the fact that rats’ brains are enough like ours that they stand in for humans in lab­o­ra­to­ries. A mis­an­throp­ic exis­ten­tial­ist may see the unflat­ter­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty as evi­dence that there’s noth­ing spe­cial about human beings, despite our grandiose sense of our­selves. A medieval Euro­pean thinker would draw a moral les­son, point­ing to the rat’s glut­tony as nature’s alle­go­ry for human greed. And a skep­ti­cal observ­er in the 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies might take note of how eas­i­ly both rats and humans can be manip­u­lat­ed; the lat­ter, for exam­ple, by pseu­do-phe­nom­e­na like Spir­i­tu­al­ism, which encom­passed a wide range of claims about ghosts and the after­life, from seances to spir­it pho­tog­ra­phy.

One such skep­ti­cal observ­er in 1920, Mil­la­ias Culpin, even wrote in his Spir­i­tu­al­ism and the New Psy­chol­o­gy of the “’sci­en­tif­ic’ sup­port­ers of spir­i­tu­al­ism,” most of them “emi­nent in phys­i­cal sci­ence.” They are eas­i­ly con­vinced, Culpin thought, because “they have been trained in a world where hon­esty is assumed to be a qual­i­ty of all work­ers. A lab­o­ra­to­ry assis­tant who played a trick upon one of them would find his career at an end, and ordi­nary cun­ning is for­eign to them. When they enter upon the world of Dis­so­ci­ates, where deceit mas­quer­ades under the dis­guise of trans­par­ent hon­esty, these emi­nent men are but as babes—country cousins in the hands of con­fi­dence-trick men.”

Such adher­ents of Spir­i­tu­al­ist beliefs were tak­en in not because they were nat­u­ral­ly cred­u­lous or stu­pid, but because they had been “trained” to trust the evi­dence of their sens­es. So-called spir­it pho­tographs, like those you see here, allowed peo­ple to “show mate­r­i­al evi­dence for their beliefs.” Pho­tog­ra­phers who cre­at­ed the images, Mash­able explains, could “eas­i­ly make two expo­sures on a sin­gle neg­a­tive, manip­u­late the neg­a­tive to cre­ate ghost­ly blurs, or over­lap two neg­a­tives in the dark­room to pro­duce an extra face with­in the resul­tant frame.”

The audi­ence for this work was “vast,” and many fit Culpin’s gen­er­al­iza­tions. In 1921, for exam­ple, para­nor­mal inves­ti­ga­tor Here­ward Car­ring­ton wrote of “a num­ber of ‘spir­it’ and ‘thought’ pho­tographs, the evi­dence for which seemed to me to be excep­tion­al­ly good.” In describ­ing oth­er pic­tures as “obvi­ous­ly fraud­u­lent” or “extreme­ly puz­zling,” Car­ring­ton made crit­i­cal dis­tinc­tions and appeared to use the meth­ods and the lan­guage of sci­ence in the eval­u­a­tion of objects pur­port­ing to prove the exis­tence of ghosts.

It may seem incred­i­ble that spir­it pho­tog­ra­phy had wide­spread appeal for as long as it did. The pho­tographs first began appear­ing in the 1860s, emerg­ing “from a small Boston por­trait stu­dio” and first made by William H. Mum­ler, the genre’s inven­tor and “most promi­nent ear­ly pro­po­nent,” writes Mash­able.

Mum­ler was nei­ther a pho­tog­ra­ph­er nor a medi­um. He orig­i­nal­ly worked as a sil­ver engraver, while dab­bling in pho­tog­ra­phy in the local stu­dio of a woman named Mrs. Stu­art. One day in 1861, in the midst of devel­op­ing a self-por­trait, Mum­ler report­ed that the dim fig­ure of a young cousin who had died twelve years ear­li­er emerged in the final print.

These ghost­ly images con­tin­ued to appear—on their own, the sto­ry goes—and the studio’s recep­tion­ist, a part-time medi­um, helped pop­u­lar­ize them. Soon Mum­ler “received vis­i­tors from across Amer­i­ca, includ­ing the recent­ly wid­owed Mary Todd Lin­coln.” Most of these vis­i­tors did not work as sci­en­tists or pro­fes­sion­al para­nor­mal inves­ti­ga­tors. They were ordi­nary peo­ple bereaved by the mass death of the Civ­il War and deeply moti­vat­ed to accept phys­i­cal con­fir­ma­tion of an after­life. More­over, before the rise of Fun­da­men­tal­ist Evan­gel­i­cal­ism in the 1920s, Spir­i­tu­al­ism was on the front lines of an ear­li­er cul­ture war: spir­it pho­tog­ra­phy was “a tan­gi­ble sym­bol of the over­ar­ch­ing argu­ment of mys­ti­cism ver­sus sci­ence and ratio­nal­ism.”

The three images at the top of the post date from the ear­li­est peri­od of spir­it pho­tog­ra­phy, between 1862 and 1875, and they were all pro­duced by Mum­ler in Boston and New York, where he moved in 1869, and where he was charged with fraud, then “acquit­ted of all charges because they could not be suf­fi­cient­ly proven.” (See many more of his pho­tos at Mash­able and the Get­ty Muse­um online archive.) Though his busi­ness suf­fered, spir­it pho­tog­ra­phy only grew more pop­u­lar, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Spir­i­tu­al­ist cir­cles in Britain, where Arthur Conan Doyle, cre­ator of the hyper-ratio­nal Sher­lock Holmes, was one of the most ardent of Spir­i­tu­al­ist believ­ers.

Doyle sup­port­ed a British pho­tog­ra­ph­er named William Hope, who began tak­ing spir­it pho­tographs in 1905, found­ed a group called the Crewe Cir­cle and lat­er “went on to prey on griev­ing fam­i­lies,” writes Riv­er Don­aghey at Vice, “who lost loved ones in WWI and des­per­ate­ly want­ed pho­to­graph­ic proof that their rel­a­tives were still hov­er­ing around in spec­tral form.” Even after Hope and his crew were exposed, Doyle con­tin­ued to sup­port him, going so far as to write a book called The Case for Spir­it Pho­tog­ra­phy. The four pho­tographs above and below are Hope’s work (see many more at Vice and the Pub­lic Domain Review). They are seri­ous­ly creepy—in the way movies like The Ring are creepy—but they are also, quite obvi­ous­ly, pho­to­graph­ic fic­tions.

Even as view­ers of pho­tog­ra­phy became savvi­er as the cen­tu­ry wore on, many peo­ple thrilled to Hope’s work until his death in 1933, maybe for the same rea­son we watch The Ring; it’s a fun scare, noth­ing more, if we sus­pend our dis­be­lief. As for the true believ­ers in spir­it photography—they are not so dif­fer­ent either from us 21st cen­tu­ry sophis­ti­cates. We’re still tak­en in all the time by hoax­es and frauds, maybe because it’s still as easy to push the but­tons in our brains, and because, well, we just want to believe.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arthur Conan Doyle & The Cot­tin­g­ley Fairies: How Two Young Girls Fooled Sher­lock Holmes’ Cre­ator

Dis­cov­er “The Ghost Club,” the His­toric Para­nor­mal Soci­ety Whose Mem­bers Includ­ed Charles Dick­ens, Arthur Conan Doyle & W.B. Yeats

Browse The Mag­i­cal Worlds of Har­ry Houdini’s Scrap­books

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Taxis to Hell – and Back – Into the Jaws of Death, by Robert F. Sar­gent, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, the­o­rists like Roland Barthes and Pierre Bour­dieu explod­ed naive notions of pho­tog­ra­phy as “a per­fect­ly real­is­tic and objec­tive record­ing of the vis­i­ble world… a ‘nat­ur­al lan­guage,’” as Bour­dieu wrote in Pho­tog­ra­phy: A Mid­dle­brow Art. Bour­dieu him­self wield­ed a cam­era dur­ing his ethno­graph­ic work in Alge­ria, tak­ing dozens of con­ven­tion­al and uncon­ven­tion­al pho­tographs of the nation’s strug­gle for inde­pen­dence from France in the 50s. Yet he urged us to see pho­tog­ra­phy as for­mal­ly medi­at­ing social real­i­ty rather than trans­par­ent­ly rep­re­sent­ing the truth.

We have been trained to inter­pret the per­spec­tives most pho­tographs adopt as objec­tive views, when in fact they are “per­fect­ly in keep­ing with the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the world which has dom­i­nat­ed Europe since the Quat­tro­cen­to.” Pho­tog­ra­phy, in oth­er words, tends to give us art imi­tat­ing Renais­sance art. It can be dif­fi­cult to bear this in mind when we look at indi­vid­ual photographs—what Barthes calls “the This.”

Whether they doc­u­ment our own fam­i­ly his­to­ries or such momen­tous events as the Nor­mandy Inva­sion that began on D‑Day, June 6th, 1944, pho­tographs elic­it pow­er­ful emo­tion­al reac­tions that defy aes­thet­ic cat­e­gories.

At the Flickr account Pho­to­sNor­mandie, you can browse and search over 4,300 high res­o­lu­tion pho­tographs from the piv­otal Nor­mandy cam­paign, “From icon­ic images like Into the Jaws of Death by Robert F. Sar­gent,” My Mod­ern Met writes, “to troops inter­act­ing with locals as they lib­er­ate areas of Nor­mandy.” The pho­tos are deeply affect­ing, often awe-inspir­ing. When we look with a crit­i­cal eye, we’ll find our­selves ask­ing cer­tain ques­tions about them.

The skewed per­spec­tive and omi­nous sky in Sargent’s “Into the Jaws of Death,” for exam­ple, at the top of the post, might make us think of the Sturm und Drang of many a dra­mat­ic ship­wreck paint­ing from the Roman­tic peri­od. Was Sar­gent aware of the sim­i­lar­i­ty when he looked through the lens? Did he posi­tion him­self to height­en the effect? In pho­tos like that fur­ther up, of a French home dis­play­ing a pro‑U.S. sign on July 11th, 1944, we might won­der whether the res­i­dents made the sign or whether it was giv­en to them, per­haps for this very pho­to op. As always, we’re jus­ti­fied in ask­ing about the role of the pho­tog­ra­ph­er in stag­ing or fram­ing a par­tic­u­lar scene.

For exam­ple, the pho­to of a Ger­man sol­dier sur­ren­der­ing to Amer­i­can G.I.s, above, looks staged. But what exact­ly these sol­diers are doing remains a mys­tery. How much do these exter­nal details mat­ter? Pho­tog­ra­phy is unique among oth­er visu­al arts in that “the Pho­to­graph,” Barthes writes, “repro­duces to infin­i­ty” what has “occurred only once.” It is the meet­ing of infin­i­ty with “only once” that engages us in more exis­ten­tial explo­rations.  All of these sol­diers and civil­ians, shar­ing their joy and anguish, most of them now passed into his­to­ry. Who were these peo­ple? What did these moments mean to them? What do they mean to us 70 years lat­er?

The bombed-out cathe­drals and defeat­ed tanks make us pon­der the fragili­ty of our own built envi­ron­ment, though the destruc­tive forces threat­en­ing to undo the mod­ern world now seem as like­ly to be nat­ur­al as man-made—or rather some new, fright­en­ing com­bi­na­tion of the two. In the faces of the wound­ed and the dis­placed, we see spe­cif­ic man­i­fes­ta­tions of the same trag­ic inva­sions and migra­tions that reach back to Thucy­dides and for­ward to the present moment in world his­to­ry, in which some 60 mil­lion peo­ple dis­placed by war and hard­ship seek sanc­tu­ary.

The images draw us away into gen­er­al obser­va­tions as they draw us back to the unre­peat­able moment. This project began on the 60th anniver­sary of D‑Day “as a way,” My Mod­ern Met explains, “to crowd­source descrip­tions of images on the now defunct Archives Nor­mandie, 1939–1945. Thus, users are encour­aged to com­ment on pho­tos if they are able to improve descrip­tions, loca­tions, and iden­ti­fi­ca­tions.” His­to­ry may rhyme with the present—as one famous quote attrib­uted to Mark Twain has it—but it nev­er exact­ly repeats. The pho­to­graph, Barthes wrote, “mechan­i­cal­ly repeats what could nev­er be repeat­ed exis­ten­tial­ly.” Moments for­ev­er lost to time, trans­mut­ed into time­less­ness by the cam­er­a’s eye. Enter the Pho­to­sNor­mandie gallery here.

via My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Fran­cis Stewart’s Cen­sored Pho­tographs of a WWII Japan­ese Intern­ment Camp

The Fin­land Wartime Pho­to Archive: 160,000 Images From World War II Now Online

31 Rolls of Film Tak­en by a World War II Sol­dier Get Dis­cov­ered & Devel­oped Before Your Eyes

200,000 Pho­tos from the George East­man Muse­um, the World’s Old­est Pho­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion, Now Avail­able Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Adobe Pho­to­shop, the world’s best-known piece of image-edit­ing soft­ware, has long since tran­si­tioned from noun to verb: “to Pho­to­shop” has come to mean some­thing like “to alter a pho­to­graph, often with intent to mis­lead or deceive.” But in that usage, Pho­to­shop­ping did­n’t begin with Pho­to­shop, and indeed the ear­ly mas­ters of Pho­to­shop­ping did it well before any­one had even dreamed of the per­son­al com­put­er, let alone a means to manip­u­late images on one. In Amer­i­ca, the best of them worked for the movies; in Sovi­et Rus­sia they worked for a dif­fer­ent kind of pro­pa­gan­da machine known as the State, not just pro­duc­ing offi­cial pho­tos but going back to pre­vi­ous offi­cial pho­tos and chang­ing them to reflect the regime’s ever-shift­ing set of pre­ferred alter­na­tive facts.

“Like their coun­ter­parts in Hol­ly­wood, pho­to­graph­ic retouch­ers in Sovi­et Rus­sia spent long hours smooth­ing out the blem­ish­es of imper­fect com­plex­ions, help­ing the cam­era to fal­si­fy real­i­ty,” writes David King in the intro­duc­tion to his book The Com­mis­sar Van­ish­es: The Fal­si­fi­ca­tion of Pho­tographs and Art in Stal­in’s Rus­sia. “Stal­in’s pock­marked face, in par­tic­u­lar, demand­ed excep­tion­al skills with the air­brush. But it was dur­ing the Great Purges, which raged in the late 1930s, that a new form of fal­si­fi­ca­tion emerged. The phys­i­cal erad­i­ca­tion of Stal­in’s polit­i­cal oppo­nents at the hands of the secret police was swift­ly fol­lowed by their oblit­er­a­tion from all forms of pic­to­r­i­al exis­tence.”

Using tools that now seem impos­si­bly prim­i­tive, Sovi­et pro­to-Pho­to­shop­pers made “once-famous per­son­al­i­ties van­ish” and craft­ed pho­tographs rep­re­sent­ing Stal­in “as the only true friend, com­rade, and suc­ces­sor to Lenin, the leader of the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion and founder of the USSR.”

This qua­si-arti­sanal work, “one of the more enjoy­able tasks for the art depart­ment of pub­lish­ing hous­es dur­ing those times,” demand­ed seri­ous dex­ter­i­ty with the scalpel, glue, paint, and air­brush. (Some exam­ples, as you can see in this five-page gallery of images from The Com­mis­sar Van­ish­es, evi­denced more dex­ter­i­ty than oth­ers.) In this man­ner, Stal­in could order writ­ten out of his­to­ry such com­rades he ulti­mate­ly deemed dis­loy­al (and who usu­al­ly wound up exe­cut­ed as) as Naval Com­mis­sar Niko­lai Yezhov, infa­mous­ly made to dis­ap­pear from Stal­in’s side on a pho­to tak­en along­side the Moscow Canal, or Peo­ple’s Com­mis­sar for Posts and Telegraphs Niko­lai Antipov, com­man­der of the Leningrad par­ty Sergei Kirov, and Chair­man of the Pre­sid­i­um of the Supreme Sovi­et Niko­lai Shvernik — pic­tured, and removed one by one, just above.

This prac­tice even extend­ed to the mate­ri­als of the Sovi­et space pro­gram, writes Wired’s James Oberg. Cos­mo­nauts tem­porar­i­ly erased from his­to­ry include Valentin Bon­darenko, who died in a fire dur­ing a train­ing exer­cise, and the espe­cial­ly promis­ing Grig­oriy Nelyubov (pic­tured, and then not pic­tured, at the top of the post), who “had been expelled from the pro­gram for mis­be­hav­ior and lat­er killed him­self.” Yuri Gagarin, the cos­mo­naut who made his­to­ry as the first human in out­er space, did not, of course, get erased by the proud author­i­ties, but even his pho­tos, like the one just above where he shakes hands with the Sovi­et space pro­gram’s top-secret leader Sergey Koroly­ov, went under the knife for cos­met­ic rea­sons, here the removal of the evi­dent­ly dis­tract­ing work­man in the back­ground — hard­ly a major his­tor­i­cal fig­ure, let alone a con­tro­ver­sial one, but still a real and maybe even liv­ing reminder that while the cam­era may lie, it can’t hold its tongue for­ev­er.

h/t @JackFeerick

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joseph Stal­in, a Life­long Edi­tor, Wield­ed a Big, Blue, Dan­ger­ous Pen­cil

Leon Trot­sky: Love, Death and Exile in Mex­i­co

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

Russ­ian His­to­ry & Lit­er­a­ture Come to Life in Won­der­ful­ly Col­orized Por­traits: See Pho­tos of Tol­stoy, Chekhov, the Romanovs & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.