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Join us in person on Tuesday, March 21 at 7 PM as Ajay Sinha presents his new book, Photo-Attractions. He will be joined in conversation by Christopher Benfey.
In Spring 1938, an Indian dancer named Ram Gopal and an American writer-photographer named Carl Van Vechten came together for a photoshoot in New York City. Ram Gopal was a pioneer of classical Indian dance and Van Vechten was reputed as a prominent white patron of the African-American movement called the Harlem Renaissance. Photo-Attractions describes the interpersonal desires and expectations of the two men that took shape when the dancer took pose in exotic costumes in front of Van Vechten’s Leica camera. The spectacular images provide a rare and compelling record of an underrepresented history of transcultural exchanges during the interwar years of early-20th century, made briefly visible through photography.
Art historian Ajay Sinha uses these hitherto unpublished photographs and archival research to raise provocative and important questions about photographic technology, colonial histories, race, sexuality and transcultural desires. Challenging the assumption that Gopal was merely objectified by Van Vechten’s Orientalist gaze, he explores the ways in which the Indian dancer co-authored the photos. In Sinha’s reading, Van Vechten’s New York studio becomes a promiscuous contact zone between world cultures, where a “photo-erotic” triangle is formed between the American photographer, Indian dancer, and German camera.
A groundbreaking study of global modernity, Photo-Attractions brings scholarship on American photography, literature, race and sexual economies into conversation with work on South Asian visual culture, dance, and gender. In these remarkable historical documents, it locates the pleasure taken in cultural difference that still resonates today.
Sinha is the Julia ’73 and Helene ’49 Herzig Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College, U.S.A. He writes and teaches about the histories of global modernity in the visual arts and media of South Asia and served on the editorial board of the online journal, Trans Asia Photography Review. His books include Imagining Architects: Creativity in Religious Monuments of India, and a co-edited collection Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens.
About Christopher Benfey
Christopher Benfey is Professor Emeritus and the Acting Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership at Mount Holyoke College. A well-regarded scholar of 19th and 20th century American literature, he has authored 5 books including If: The Untold Story of Kipling's American Years (2019); A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (2009); The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (2003), Degas in New Orleans (1997); and The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1992). A family memoir, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay; Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival was published in 2012, and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Benfey frequently contributes as a literary and art critic to publications such as The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review.
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