Artist Carl Van Vechten: Iowa Time Machine December 21, 1964

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On December 21, 1964, photographer, author, and patron of the Harlem Renaissance Carl Van Vechten, originally of Cedar Rapids, passed away. Van Vechten wrote extensively and created more than 15,000 photographic images during his lifetime, leaving behind an archive that would become essential to understanding African American cultural history and the Harlem Renaissance.

Van Vechten was born on June 17, 1880, in Cedar Rapids into a prosperous and politically liberal family. His parents had him late in life, surrounded by adults who fostered his intellectual curiosity and tolerance for difference. After graduating from Washington High School in 1898 and the University of Chicago in 1903, Van Vechten moved to New York in 1906 to work as an assistant music critic for The New York Times. There, he became America's first serious critic of modern dance, writing about Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova with the sophistication of someone who understood that art could transform society.

Between 1922 and 1930, publisher Alfred A. Knopf released seven Van Vechten novels, including an incredibly controversial novel in 1926. The 1926 novel about Harlem life earned both praise from Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson and condemnation from others who saw it as exploitation. When his brother Ralph's widow died in 1928, Van Vechten inherited a million-dollar trust fund that gave him the financial freedom to abandon writing entirely at age 50 and pursue photography.

By 1930, Van Vechten took up photography, using his apartment at 150 West 55th Street as a studio, where he photographed many notable people. Beginning in 1932, Van Vechten photographed many of the most famous and influential figures of his day, as well as up-and-comers and artistic outliers. He invited writers, musicians, dancers, and activists to sit before his camera against bold backdrops inspired by Matisse. His subjects ranged from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to Bessie Smith and Paul Robeson, from James Baldwin and Richard Wright to Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. #Iowa #OTD #History #Writing #Photography