Admired for his patronage of the Harlem Renaissance, reviled for the exploitation of it in his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) has inspired love and hate. Art historian James Smalls wants it both ways. And right he is, too.

Smalls shines a new light onto an understudied portion of Van Vechten's impressive output, a cache of male nude photographs sealed in boxes at Yale's Beinecke Library for twenty-five years after his death. Taken in the 1930s and 1940s, often pairing one black and one white model, they are expertly analysed in all their transgressive as well as racist potential, in part to access “Van Vechten's private erotic and public artistic urges” (22). With deft turns of phrase and analytical prowess, Smalls holds onto seemingly binary, contradictory points of view. The images, he demonstrates, “underscored and undermined mainstream attitudes to modernist primitivism,” while they “simultaneously praise[d] and police[d] male sexuality and the body” (5). Van Vechten thereby both “demean[ed] and ennoble[d] African Americans” (100) in a body of work marked by ambivalence, complexity, and ambiguity.

That said, there seem a number of missed opportunities. Little is revealed about model Hugh Laing, an English ballet dancer, less still about his black counterpart Juante Meadows, which Smalls blames, perhaps too hastily, on limited sources. In his close readings, therefore, Smalls must perpetuate the racializing discourses he critiques, referring to the two repeatedly as “the white man” and “the black man” (68, 72). He notes Meadows's sullen countenance but does not elaborate on his complicated interactions with as many as four white collaborators at a shoot – Laing, lighting assistant Mark Lutz, Van Vechten and the friend whose Connecticut estate he uses – preferring instead to probe, with considerable success, the photographer's individual psychosexual dynamics around the fetish, the self and the other. Images are sometimes treated in isolation, without reference to Van Vechten's better-known portraits of black and white celebrities. How might arguments about primitivism and a sculpted “head of the africaine” (67), a prop in images of Laing and Meadows, be strengthened with reference to its use in a portrait of Isak Dinesen? Would claims about camp and a glittery curtain creating a “hallucinatory, dreamlike space” (103) of erotic fantasy be revised if we know it was also the backdrop to portraits of Marion Anderson, Leontyne Price, Jerome Robbins and Arthur Rubinstein? For a repetitious text, given to liberal quoting of other scholars, we rarely hear Van Vechten's own words, which might have provided better support for – or a challenge to – uncharacteristically totalizing assertions that he “failed to consider … the inherent inequity of power between whites and blacks” (61), that his images “disallow[ed] any real power or voice for the black man” (63). Similarly, Van Vechten might have been saved from the occasional psychologizing of his efforts as “obsessive,” “myopic,” “maniacal” (113).

Even so, with perceptive comparisons to the work of more recent black photographers such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Ajamu Ikwe Tyekimba, Smalls tracks compelling trajectories in twentieth-century, interracial, homoerotic photography. His important book will surely inform much new work in the field.