DeCarava, Roy

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Roy DeCarava

Personal

Born December 9, 1919, in New York, NY; son of Andrew and Elfreda DeCarava; married Sherry Turner (an art historian), September 4, 1971; children: Susan, Wendy, Laura. Education: Studied architecture and sculpture at Cooper Union Institute, New York, 1938-40; studied painting and printmaking at Harlem Art Center, 1940-42; studied drawing and painting at George Washington Carver Art School, 1944-45.

Addresses

Homem—81 Halsey St., Brooklyn, New York, NY 11216. Officem— Division of Humanities and Arts,Hunter College of the City University of New York, 695 Park Ave., New York, NY 10021.

Career

Artist and photographer. Works Project Administration (WPA), New York, NY, sign painter and display artist, 1936-37, technical draftsman, 1939-42, commercial artist and illustrator, 1944-58; A Photographers Gallery, New York, NY, co-founder and director, 1954-56; freelance photographer with work for Fortune, Newsweek, Time, Life, and other magazines, 1960s; Kamoinge Workshop for black photographers, founder and director, 1963-66; Sports Illustrated, New York, NY, contract photographer, 1968-75; Cooper Union Institute, New York, NY, adjunct professor of photography, 1969-72; Hunter College,New York, NY, associate professor, 1975-78, professor, 1978-88, distinguished professor of art, 1988m—. Military service: U.S. Army, topographical draftsman, 1943.

Member

American Society of Magazine Photographers (chair, committee to end discrimination against black photographers, 1963-66).

Awards, Honors

Guggenheim photography fellowship, 1952; Art Service Award, Mt. Morris United Presbyterian Church (New York, NY), 1969; Benin Creative Photography Award, 1972; Artistic and Cultural Achievement Award, Community Museum of Brooklyn, 1979; named honorary citizen, Houston, TX, 1975; honorary doctorate, Rhode Island School of Design, 1985, Rhode Island Institute of Fine Arts, 1985, Maryland Institute, 1986, and Wesleyan University, 1992; Distinguished Career in Photography Award, Friends of Photography, 1991; Special Citation for Photographic Journalism, American Society of Magazine Photographers, 1991.

Writings

(Photographer) The Sweet Flypaper of Life, text by Langston Hughes, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1955.

Roy DeCarava: Photographs, 1981.

Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1996.

The Sound I Saw: Improvisation on a Jazz Theme, Phaidon Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Sidelights

Since the 1950s Roy DeCarava has been capturing New York City's vivid streetscapes, dramatic interiors, and vibrant moods with his camera. DeCarava belongs to a unique sector of photographers: he captures images of the city's diverse African-American community and has distinguished himself within that group by choosing to focus his lens on the personal rather than the political aspects of black society. In 1996 DeCarava's long career was honored with a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the same institution that helped launch his career in the early 1950s when it purchased three prints from the up-and-coming young black artist. While DeCarava's work had until this point lingered on the fringes of major recognition, the MoMA exhibition and laudatory reviews introduced it to a wider audience.

"Critical comment has seemed sometimes almost perverse in its obliviousness to the beauty and 'tenderness' . . . that is virtually a hallmark of DeCarava's images," wrote Maren Stange in Art in America. "Such seemingly willful inattention reminds us of how difficult it still can be to grant esthetic autonomy and ambition to images bym—orofm—African-Americans." In the New York Times Vicki Goldberg deemed DeCarava an artist far ahead of his time. "Today it is hardly unusual for black photographer-artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Adrian Piper to comment on African-American lifeand history," Goldberg wrote, "but DeCarava came out of an essentially silent era."

DeCarava was born in New York City on December 9, 1919. His mother, Elfreda, was from Jamaica, and she raised her son alone after her marriage ended. An only child, DeCarava worked as a shoeshiner, newspaper seller, and even an ice hauler, but his mother also made certain that her artistically gifted boy had both art supplies and music lessons. He entered the Harlem annex of New York City's Textile High School, but the branch was a poor cousin of its main school on 18th Street in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. DeCarava and another classmate managed to transfer to the main campus, where they became the school's sole black students.

After graduating in 1938, DeCarava took a job as a sign painter with the Works Project Administration. More commonly known as the WPA, this federally funded arts program helped alleviate unemployment during the Great Depression by putting artists to work executing large-scale public projects. Classes, workshops, and other avenues of employment were also open to artists of all media. The fruits of the WPA can still be seen in the large-scale murals found in post offices and other government buildings.

After entering a citywide artistic competition, DeCarava won a scholarship to study architecture and sculpture at the Cooper Union Institute. He spent two years there, but had a hard time dealing with what he felt was institutionalized discrimination against its minority students. He went instead to the Harlem Art Center on 125th Street, where he studied painting and printmaking. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army as a topographical draftsman, but again felt the sting of racism, and was eventually granted a medical leave. Back in Harlem, DeCarava earned a living by working as a commercial artist and illustrator, but his artistic career also began to flourish, and he exhibited his first silkscreen prints at a New York gallery in 1947.

Capturing Street Life with a Camera

DeCarava began using a camera around 1946 to document street images he wanted to paint, and he soon became so involved in chronicling Harlem's rich street life that he abandoned painting and print-making altogether. The first show of his photographic work was held at the city's Forty-fourth Street Gallery in 1950. The gallery owner, a photographer himself, taught DeCarava much of what he knew about darkroom technique. Soon his works were championed by acclaimed photographer Edward Steichen, a pioneer in the form and curator of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art at the time. Steichen suggested that DeCarava apply for a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, and in 1952 he became the first African-American photographer ever to win one. On his fellowship application, he wrote that he hoped "to show the strength, the wisdom, the dignity of the Negro people. Not the famous and the well known, but the unknown and the unnamed, thus revealing the roots from which spring the greatness of all human beings," as quoted by Minneapolis Star Tribune writer Mary Abbe.

The Guggenheim fellowship, $3,200, was a small fortune in 1952, and it enabled DeCarava to dedicate a great deal of time documenting Harlem and its residents. This northern section of Manhattan had been home to the city's black middle class since the early twentieth century, and an influx of new residents arrived in large numbers in the 1920s. The climate soon gave rise to an exciting artistic awakening that decade, the first truly African-American cultural movement, which came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Studio photographers such as James Van Der Zee documented that period, but there had been no black photographers working in a purely artistic vein. Later came Gordon Parks, who was also a renowned photojournalist, but Harlem's glory days had faded a bit by the 1940s. It was still home to a black middle class and a thriving jazz scene, but the area had been hard hit by the Great Depression, and in the post-World War II years was considered dangerously overcrowded and an example of some of the more negative aspects of black urban America. New York Times writer Vicki Goldberg called DeCarava's goal to document life in Harlem "the direct outgrowth of the first movement to proclaim black beautiful, in the first quarter of this century. As blacks moved out of the South en masse and discovered that discrimination was very much alive in the North as well, a heightened sense of common identity developed." Time writer Richard Lacayo compared DeCarava's visual chronicles of urban life to the work of masters like Paris's Henri Cartier-Bresson and Chicago's Harry Callaghan, but added "what was different for DeCarava was that most of his streets were in Harlem, which made him a roving eye in a part of town that the rest of the world didn't see much of."

First Book Published

The images that resulted from this period of DeCarava's career were published in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, with text by famed Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. The 1955 volume, a watershed event for DeCarava, was later hailed as "groundbreaking" and "an achingly beautiful book "by American Visions critic Fern Robinson. That same year DeCarava was invited to participate in the Museum of Modern Art's historic "Family of Man "photography exhibition, which toured museums around the world. DeCarava also opened a small, appointment-only gallery in his home on West Eighty-fifth Street, where he sold the works of other photographers who were trying to move from journalism or commercial work to more artistic careers.

DeCarava's career failed to sustain its momentum, however. He had to close the gallery in 1957 due to poor sales, and he became choosy about where his own work was exhibited. To support himself, he worked as a freelance photojournalist, and his images were soon appearing in the pages of Fortune, Newsweek, Time, Life, and other national magazines. He documented many moving images of the civil rights era, including the 1963 March on Washington, and continued to shoot on the streets of Harlem. For decades Harlem had been home to famed ballrooms and small nightclubs where both blacks and whites congregated to hear the artists ranging from Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway in the early days to John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald in the 1950s. DeCarava found himself increasingly drawn to musicians as subjects, and enjoyed jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and others for hours before turning his camera on them in an attempt to provide a visual snapshot of their work.

In 1963 DeCarava founded the Kamoinge Workshop and served as its director until 1966. The name Kamoinge was taken from a Bantu term meaning "group effort," and the workshop supported young African-American photographers in the city. He also chaired the American Society of Magazine Photographers' committee to End Discrimination against Black Photographers during this period. In 1968 he was hired as a contract photographer for Sports Illustrated magazine, a lucrative position but one that he later dismissed as irrelevant to his overall career. Finally, in 1975, DeCarava became an associate professor at Hunter College in New York City, which allowed him to give up his commercial jobs altogether. He was made a full professor of art in 1978, and a distinguished professor in 1988.

DeCarava's reputation as a photographer grew during the 1980s, and he lectured frequently as well. The list of museums and galleries that showed his work grew, and in 1996 New York's Museum of Modern Art honored him with a major show. The nearly 200 images in Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective toured several U.S. cities, and a new generation of critics hailed him as a pioneer and a visionary. "His Harlem," wrote Abbe, "is a place of love, laughter and loneliness. A place where couples slow-dance in shabby kitchens, weary workers trudge subway stairs, jazz musicians jam in shadowy clubs, children play on empty curbs and the panorama of life unfolds in shimmering window reflections." Reviewing the retrospective, Lacayo asserted that DeCarava's "street pictures speak in the international language of the snapshot aesthetic." Commenting on the rich tonalities of gray that soon became a hallmark of DeCarava's work, Lacayo also noted that the "most enduring pictures dare you to see in the dark. They're so heavily shadowed that your eyes have to adjust to the carbon-tone depths."

Jazz Photographs Published

The 1996 retrospective helped awaken further interest in DeCarava's body of work, and he was finally able to find a publisher for his second book, The Sound I Saw: Improvisation on a Jazz Theme. He had begun assembling the collection years before, culling images from the hundreds of jazz photos he had taken between 1950 and 1962, and he wrote lyrical passages to accompany unposed portraits of jazz greats like Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, and Miles Davis. The collection of photographs includes several essays on DeCarava's work as well. Both the exhibition and its accompanying book featured a central group of portraits of Coltrane, whom DeCarava had come to know first as a dedicated fan and eventually as a friend. The Sound I Saw 's central showpiece on Coltrane is "surely one of the definitive responses to and interpretations of the man and his work by a major visual artist," declared A. D. Colemane. Goldberg particularly liked one image in which "Louis Armstrong, duded up, strides gigantically down a Harlem street with his mouth open in joy, a king sashaying across his concrete kingdom. "Independent contributor David Usborne called the book "a unique glimpse of an era. . . . The crack in a single window of a crumbling tenement building was just as clearly picked out as the cut of the diamonds on Billie Holiday's earring. The rubble of an empty lot was caught as a vivid reflection in the shining hubcaps of an artist's limousine." Coleman attempted to sum up the achievement of DeCarava's two-decade project. "Perceptive, emotional, fluid and intimate, the style DeCarava had evolved was a response to the rhythms and textures of urban life," Coleman declared, "and in particular to the black experience in the cities of the East Coast. "DeCarava stopped documenting the jazz world after a time, feeling that an era had passed. "Something happened to the musicians," he said in an interview with Robinson for American Visions. "I think the way they are taught has a great deal of influence over how they play. They are no longer taught the way they once were, by experience. They are taught intellectually. Some soulfulness has gone out of their music."

DeCarava's images of life in New York City document a truly vanished time. The innate dichotomies of the city abound in them, often accidentally: in the 1966 work "Man Sitting on Cart," from 1966, DeCarava captures a man resting for a moment on a wire-enclosed wheeled platform once used for delivering packages. Photographed from behind, he appears confined by it, and a chauffeured limousine looms elsewhere in the frame. "Hallway," taken in 1953, is often mentioned by critics as one of the most moving of DeCarava's works. It is also one of his own favorites. DeCarava told San Francisco Chronicle journalist Sam Whiting: "It was all the hallways I grew up in. They were poor, poor tenements, badly lit, narrow and confining. Hallways that had something to do with the economics of building for poor people."

Afterimage writer Melissa Rachleff saw this image of the dark corridor as a metaphor for DeCarava's unique vision. "In many ways, 'Hallway' is in dialogue with DeCarava's view of American culture, unintimidated by the gap between the ideal of American democracy and the real, unequal conditions," she reflected. "The photograph struggles to come into focus beyond the palette of gray, ultimately fading off into a fuzzy haze and revealing the depth and complexity of American life. There is despair and alienation in DeCarava photographs, but there is also romance, community and activism."

DeCarava still teaches at the city's Hunter College, and lives in Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. His career, he told Usborne, has had many peaks and valleys. "I was famous, then I got buried, then I was famous again, then I got buried again and then I was famous again," he said, laughing. "I don't think they even know who I am on this street. I am just the old man who lives next door."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Alinder, James, Roy DeCarava, Photographer (exhibition catalog), [Lincoln, NE], 1970.

If you enjoy the works of Roy DeCarava

If you enjoy the works of Roy DeCarava, you may also want to check out the following:

Cecil J. Williams, Freedom and Justice: Four Decades of the Civil Rights Struggle as Seen by a Black Photographer of the Deep South, 1995.

Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, 2004.

Walker Evans, Many Are Called, 2004.

Contemporary Photographers, 3rd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Fax, Elton, Seventeen Black Artists, Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1973.

Newsmakers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

St. James Guide to Black Artists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Short, Alvia Wardlaw, Roy DeCarava: Photographs (exhibition catalog), [Houston, TX], 1975.

PERIODICALS

Afterimage, January-February, 1997, Melissa Rachleff, "The Sounds He Saw: The Photography of Roy DeCarava," p. 15.

American Visions, December, 1999, Fern Robinson, "Masterful American Photographer Roy DeCarava," p. 20.

Art Digest, May 1, 1946, "Negro Winners."

Artforum, May, 1996, Max Kozloff, "Time Stands Still: The Photographs of Roy DeCarava," pp. 78-83.

Art in America, June, 1988, p. 10; March, 1996, Maren Stange, "Shadow and Substance," p. 35; April, 2004, Charles Dee Mitchell, "Roy DeCarava at Ariel Meyerowitz," p. 133.

Artweek, January 18, 1987, Michael McManus, "Recognition for the Invisible Man"; January 19, 1988, "Roy DeCarava," p. 12; March 22, 1991, Steven Jenkins, "Roy DeCarava," p. 3.

Black Issues Book Review, September, 2001, p. 38.

Booklist, March 15, 1996, p. 1233.

Christian Science Monitor, February 7, 1996, p. 10.

Independent (London, England), August 26, 2001, David Usborne, interview with DeCarava, p. 19.

Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1996, p. 6.

New York Times, February 11, 1996; March 27, 1996.

Petersen's Photographic, February, 2002, review of The Sound I Saw, p. 49.

San Francisco Chronicle, January 22, 1998, p. E1; February 3, 1998, p. E1.

School Arts, February, 2002, p. 33.

Star-Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), February 12, 1999, p. E1.

Time, February 12, 1996, Richard Lacayo, "The Shadows Know," p. 73.