Photos to Inspire
Ode to Roy DeCarava
By DE contributor
Nov 6, 2009

© All photos Roy DeCarava Estate

Roy DeCarava an art photographer, was known for his pictures of everyday life in Harlem and for his candid shots of jazz musicians. Shadow and darkness are hallmarks of his style. He passed away last week at 89.

DeCarava's photographs of the 1940s, '50s and '60s depicted an insider's view of the subway stations, restaurants, apartments and especially the people who lived in the neighborhood.

Roy Rudolph DeCarava was born in New York City’s Harlem in 1919.He studied painting at Cooper Union Institute, painting and printmaking at the Harlem Art Center, and drawing and painting at George Washington Carver Art School in 1944. He originally purchased a camera (in 1946) to document his work in printmaking, but by 1949 photography itself was his sole artistic focus. He went on to establish himself as a post-war street photographer of daily life, specifically African-American life in New York. DeCarava was not the first photographer to shoot Harlem, but his commitment to interpreting it in artistic terms sets him apart from the history of social documentary established there.

His first photography exhibition was in 1950 at Mark Pepper’s Forty Fourth Street Gallery. Edward Steichen purchased three for the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. There Homor Page, a student of Steiglitz, befriended DeCarava and began discussing darkroom technique with him. Soon thereafter, DeCarava started to experiment with a darker tonal range. His studies of the New York jazz world, begun a few years later, further developed his penchant for dark printing. While the deep tones in his pictures sometimes push the edge of legibility, both true blacks and true whites are rare.

In 1952 DeCarava became the first African-American recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. At first rejected by publishers, photographs from the project were eventually published with the help of Langston Hughes in 1955. Shortly thereafter, DeCarava opened one of the first galleries in New York devoted to photography, A Photographer’s Gallery, which would feature exhibitions of Bernice Abbott, Harry Callahan, and Minor White in the two years it was open. At the same time, he began a series on jazz musicians that would occupy him for a decade.

Roy DeCarava’s work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s Family of Man exhibition. In 1958 he began to take on commercial projects, and his pictures have appeared in such periodicals as Sports Illustrated, Look, Newsweek, Time, and Life. He ran the Kamoinge Workshop for young African-American photographers from 1963 to 1966. In 1969 he refused to be a part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Harlem on My Mind, critiquing its conception of African-American artists and its marginalization of photography as an art form. He began teaching at Hunter College in New York City in 1975, where he became a full professor of art. In 1992 Wesleyan University awarded him the honorary degree of doctor of fine arts.

In 1996 The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective of his work.