Generations in Black and White

Photographs from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection

Edited by Rudolph P. Byrd

Photographs by Carl Vechten

Title Details

Pages: 200

Illustrations: 83 b&w photos

Trim size: 8.250in x 10.700in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 02/01/2014

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4617-5

List Price: $30.95

eBook

Pub Date: 02/01/2014

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4699-1

List Price: $30.95

Subsidies and Partnerships

Published with the generous support of Sarah Mills Hodge Fund

Generations in Black and White

Photographs from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection

Edited by Rudolph P. Byrd

Photographs by Carl Vechten

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  • Description
  • Reviews

This portfolio of eighty-three photographs constitutes a stunning celebration of African American achievement in the twentieth century. Carl Van Vechten, a longtime patron of black writers and artists, took these photographs over the course of three decades—primarily as gifts to his subjects, such luminaries as W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Joe Louis, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ruby Dee, Lena Horne, and James Earl Jones.

The photographs Rudolph P. Byrd has selected for this volume come from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters, which Van Vechten established at Yale University. Byrd has arranged the images chronologically, according to the time at which each subject emerged as a vital presence in African American tradition.

Complementing the photographs are a substantial introduction by Byrd, biographical sketches of each subject, and poems by the noted writer Michael S. Harper. The result is a volume of beauty and power, a record of black excellence that will engage and inform new generations.

How vividly the pictures (reflect) the vitality of the black culture of their eras.

Publishers Weekly

Carl Van Vechten's portraits of artists, athletes, academics, and activists he respected . . . reflect his appreciation of the diverse contributions of African Americans.

Booklist

Carl Van Vechten's portrait style—formal, direct, and free of the extraneous—anticipated the celebrity photography of Richard Avedon and Andy Warhol.

San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle

A visual and chronological history of the movers and shapers of the Harlem Renaissance. . . . A true history, and nonesuch other compilation exists.

Quarterly Black Review of Books

About the Author/Editor

Rudolph P. Byrd (Editor)
RUDOLPH P. BYRD (1953–2011) was a professor of African American Literature and director of African American Studies, Emory University.

Carl Van Vechten (Photographer)
CARL VAN VECHTEN (1880–1964) was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.