'O, Write My Name'

A Limited Edition Portfolio of Hand-Pulled Gravures

Carl Van Vechten, hand-pulled gravures by Richard Benson and Thomas Palmer

1983

Carl Van Vechten's magnificent photographs of his Harlem friends have, at long last, for the first time, received their due, gloriously reproduced in hand-pulled gravure from the original negatives by Richard Benson and Thomas Palmer. Fifty 9 x 6-inch gravures printed on the finest paper each with a letterpress caption providing biographical information, dates and a brief excerpt from a related work.

"Marvelous!" –The New York Times

Lottie Allen
Marian Anderson
James Baldwin
Romare Bearden
Mary McLeod Bethune
Arna Bontemps
John W. Bubbles
Ralph Bunche
Countee Cullen
Ossie Davis
Ruby Dee
W.E.B. DuBois
Katherine Dunham
Ruby Elzy
Ella Fitzgerald
Althea Gibson
Dizzy Gillespie
W.C. Handy
Roland Hayes
Altonell Hines
Nora Holt
Lena Horne
Langston Hughes
Zora Neale Hurston
Mahalia Jackson
Charles S. Johnson
J. Rosamond Johnson
James Weldon Johnson
Jacob Lawrence
Alain Locke
Joe Louis
Rose McClendon
Claude McKay
Mildred Perkins
Vera Peterson
Horace Pippin
Dorothy Porter
Leontyne Price
Paul Robeson
Bill Robinson
Edith Sampson
Bessie Smith
Maxine Sullivan
Howard Swanson
Sarah Victor
Margaret Walker
Fredi Washington
Ethel Waters
Josh White
Richard Wright

O, write my name, O, write my name
O, write my name... 
Write my name when-a you get home... 
Yes, write my name in the book of life... 
The Angels in the heav’n going-to write my name. 
–Spiritual, Underground Railroad

Ralph Waldo Emerson thought that some individuals lived with such purpose, intensity, and commitment that their lives would come to exemplify the grandness and beauty of the human spirit. He called such persons “Representative” because they stood for the achieved human potential.

The faces you are about to see are of men and women who would comport well with Emerson’s idea. Each has stamped a personal style and character on life and circumstance; so much that the rest of us can experience the world they touched by seeing it through their lives. Each face will evoke in us a shock of recognition, not merely of a personal art or achievement but of an entire people’s struggle against great odds. Each face reassures us that it is in the human spirit not merely to survive, even to prevail, but to transcend.

These photographs were taken by Carl Van Vechten. He saw himself as celebrating black Americans—many his personal friends—in whom he sensed unique and compelling character. He believed that a camera could communicate their qualities. He sought to create a photographic record. Richard Benson has translated Van Vechten’s images into the permanent tribute of hand gravure prints.
–Nathan I. Huggins (1927-1989), W. E. B. DuBois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies, Harvard University