Crowded

Helen Morgan, 1932

Somehow or another I stumbled upon this site last weekend and spent close to an hour looking at each and every one of the black and white photos of women(as well as reading the info about each one). They were all takeN by Carl Van Vechten, whose name I was vaguely familiar with but thought he was a writer of some sort. However, he began an interest in photography when he was a boy in 1890's Iowa and continued to take photos all his life, but interestingly, never for money.

"Van Vechten never took commissions, he never sold his photographs, he only granted permission to publish them when he was assured of the quality of reproduction in periodicals and other news organs, he never photographed anybody he didn’t want to photograph, and he gave away his multiple copies of his prints to their subjects and to friends. Moreover, the scope of sittings varied widely: he made four or five photographs of Myra Hess, but over a period of years he made four or five hundred photographs of Alicia Markova. A few years later, he began to establish impressive photographic archives to accompany his gifts of books and manuscripts to libraries, and he continued this activity until his death."

The photos at the Extravagant Crowd on line exhibit are all women, shot by Van Vechten during what appears to be the years between 1932 and 1955(which is the period in time that I am a little obsessed with). What struck me at once was how contemporary these women seem. Check out the image of Carol Channing, even.

I love the stories about each one, such as the notes about torch singer Helen Morgan (shown above):
"Today, Morgan is perhaps best remembered in the role of Julie in Showboat, a part she played on Broadway and in the 1936 film. It was in this role, after an evening performance, that Morgan became one of Carl Van Vechten’s first photographic subjects. Already a little drunk when she arrived, Morgan asked her chauffeur to bring a bottle of brandy from her car after Van Vechten had taken only a few pictures. They drank and talked and Van Vechten photographed Morgan well into the night; “Helen did not depart until four-thirty in the morning,” Van Vechten’s friend, Donald Angus, remembered, “but during the interim Carl had captured both the bitterness and the ebullience of the story of her wretched life, which she told at length as the time passed and the brandy dwindled.”