PHOTO-ATTRACTIONS

November 2022

Photography • Cultural Studies

“Ajay Sinha has woven a finely detailed tapestry of the social, personal and aesthetic allusions that contribute greatly to understanding and reimagining Ram Gopal’s mystique and presence. This is timely, refreshing, colorful and a much needed intervention in our his- and her-stories around dance and the camera.”

—Uttara Asha Coorlawala, co-curator of Erasing Borders festival of Indian Dance

“Sinha’s is an extremely luminous and well-researched project. It is also a beautifully written, deeply analytical, and entirely accessible book, narrated with verve, and a pleasure to read.”

—Saloni Mathur, author of A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art

“This book arises from a thrilling pas de deux between a Modernist American photographer and an Indian classical dancer, in which it’s never entirely clear who is calling the shots. In deciphering the subtle aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual weave of these sessions, Ajay Sinha identifies a third partner in this elaborate dance, namely Van Vechten’s German-made Leica camera. This is an exhilarating book, intellectually compelling and visually mesmerizing. And the photographs are to die for.”

—Christopher Benfey, author of Degas in New Orleans and The Great Wave

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 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 the 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Art historian Ajay Sinha uses these hitherto unpublished photographs and archival research to raise provocative and important questions about photographic technology, colonial histories, race, sexuality and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.

AJAY SINHA is the Julia ’73 and Helene ’49 Herzig Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College. His books include Imagining Architects: Creativity in Religious Monuments of India and the co-edited collection Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens

This page (clockwise from top left):

Carl Van Vechten, “Ram Gopal,” April 21, 1938, neg. no. XI M26

Carl Van Vechten, undated postcard, probably 1944

Carl Van Vechten, “Ram Gopal,” April 21, 1938, neg. no. XIII 22 La Meri and Ram Gopal in Java on Kalasan Temple, seated on makaras, May 1937. Credit: Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts.

Facing page:

Carl Van Vechten, Anna May Wong, April 29, 1937, neg. no. XXVI K:20

192 pp 5.5 x 8.5

978-1-9788-2986-2 paper $24.95T

978-1-9788-2987-9 cloth $59.95SU

November 2022

Psychology • Health • Body/Mind/Spirit