Photo-Attractions : An Indian Dancer, an American Photographer, and a German Camera

In Praise of Photo-Attractions "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 "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 muchneeded intervention in our his-and her-stories around dance and the camera." -Uttara Asha Coorlawala, co-curator of Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance "With extraordinary finesse, Ajay Sinha reconstructs two remarkable artists' collaborative fantasy-making through a Leica camera, which produced what he calls the 'photo-dance': a voluptuous intermedial object imbued with cross-cultural provocations. As much an astute commentary on Orientalism, post coloniality, and race as it is an informed critique of the silences of established archival memory, this virtuosic study is a mesmerizing read." -Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Duke University "A trio performs: a beautiful male dancer of Indo-Burmese origins, a cult photographer with a Leica, the metal prosthesis that acquires a life of its own-'photo-eroticism.' This expansively researched book with a nonlinear structure has a discursive flamboyance. A historical moment spins into the contemporary; the language of the writer enthralls the reader." -Vivan Sundaram, visual artist, founder, and trustee, Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation "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 Sinha's lucid, incisive analysis, we encounter a world of technological messiness and experimentation, cultural disparities, and new, transitional queer masculinities, all set against the backdrop of the twentieth-century reinvention of Indian dance and the complexities of Euro-American Orientalism. A timely contribution to the fields of both dance studies and visual culture studies." -Hari Krishnan, author of Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam "Sinha provides a remarkably rich account that does justice to the contact zone unearthed by his archival discovery. Both vivid and perceptive, Sinha's prose grips from the start and unfolds three days in the 1930s into a marvelous larger panorama of representational practices, a broader intercultural landscape, and the intimacy of personal encounters." -Christopher Pinney, professor of anthropology and visual culture, University College London "Photo-Attractions is the fascinating account, by a masterful storyteller, of a single extended portrait session that took place between Indian classical dancer Ram Gopal and photographer Carl Van Vechten in New York in 1938. Sinha's cosmopolitan vision, deeply informed by histories of dance, gesture, performance, and photography, offers brilliant new perceptions of transcultural exchanges of gender, sexuality, and desire in the early twentieth century. An illumination." -Laura Wexler, author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism Photo-Attractions April and May 1938 written in pencil and sometimes green ink. The dancer was named Ram Gopal (figs. P.1 and P.2). No one in the conference knew about the existence of the set, the photographer, or the subject. Given that the conference focused mostly on photographs taken in South Asia, I assumed that Van Vechten might have traveled to India in search of his subject. It turns out that, in the spring of 1938, Gopal, a trained classical dancer, traveled for a concert in New York, where he came in contact with the writer-photographer. The two collaborated in a three-day photo shoot in Van Vechten's studio apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. The images are a small part of Van Vechten's over seventeen thousand photographs of celebrities and people in the arts at the Beinecke. The photographs are unknown to scholars of South Asian photography in part because they belong to the Van Vechten Papers and are catalogued under the Yale Collection of American Literature, with which Van Vechten is associated. The Beinecke images are overlooked also because of the disciplinary boundaries separating American literature, and photography for that matter, and Indian visual and performing arts. My book grows in the blind spot between the disciplines and finds in "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 Lecia 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 resonate today"-- Provided by publisher 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. A groundbreaking study of global modernity and the cultural interchange between America and South Asia, Photo-Attractions uses a rare and unpublished set of 1938 photographs taken by the photographer Carl Van Vechten of the Indian dancer Ram Gopal in exotic costumes to raise provocative questions about race, sexual identity, photographic technology, colonial histories, and transcultural desires. Contents Prelude Chapter 1. The Photo Studio Chapter 2. The Dancer Chapter 3. The Photographer Chapter 4. The Camera Chapter 5. Photo-Dance Chapter 6. Afterimages Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index About the Author