Van Vechten, Carl:

$850 · Offered by William Reese Company

[Original Portrait Photograph of Althea Gibson]. An early portrait of the ground-breaking African American tennis star, showing her in left profile, in tennis dress, with racquet, looking pensively toward the ground. This print bears Van Vechten's blindstamp, and on the verso his ink studio stamp. The subject and negative number are also written on the verso in ink, in Van Vechten's hand. There are prints of ten other negatives from the same sitting in the Library of Congress Van Vechten photo archive, but not this image; two prints of different images from the sitting were included in EXTRAVAGANT CROWD CARL VAN VECHTEN'S PORTRAITS OF WOMEN (Yale, Beinecke Library, 2003).

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