DeCarava, Roy 1919–

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Roy DeCarava 1919–

Photographer

Roy DeCarava spent the better half of a century photographing life in Harlem. His rich, deeply evocative images—of life on its streets, of struggling families inside well-tended homes, of legendary jazz musicians of a bygone era—endure as a document of urban life in twentieth century America. He is considered the first photographer outside of photojournalism to make the African-American experience his primary subject matter. A New York Times profile by Vicki Goldberg deemed him 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 life and 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, but raised him 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 son 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 in the Chelsea neighborhood. DeCarava and another classmate managed to transfer to the main campus, and there they were the sole black students. After graduating in 1938, he took a job as a sign painter with the Works Project Administration, a federally funded public-works program that gave hundreds of artists gainful employment during the Great Depression.

Wanted to Document Everyday People

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, and studied painting and printmaking there. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army as 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

At a Glance…

Born Roy Rudolph DeCarava on December 9, 1919, in New York, NY; son of Andrew and Elfreda DeCarava; married Sherry Turner (an art historian), 1971; children: Susan, Wendy, Laura. Education: Studied architecture and sculpture at Cooper Union Institute, New York, 1938-40, painting and printmaking at the Harlem Art Center, 1940-42, and drawing and painting at George Washington Carver Art School, New York, 1944-45. Military: U.S. Army, topographical draftsman, 1943.

Career: Artist and photographer, 1936-; Works Project Administration, New York City, sign painter and display artist, 1936-37, technical draftsman, 1939-42, commercial artist and illustrator, 1944-58; A Photographers Gallery, New York City, 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, contract photographer, 1968-75; Cooper Union Institute, New York City, adjunct professor of photography, 1969-72; Hunter College, New York City, associate professor, 1975-78, professor of art, 1978-88, distinguished professor of art, 1988-.

Memberships: American Society of Magazine Photographers, chair, Committee to End Discrimination Against Black Photographers, 1963-66.

Awards: Guggenheim Photography Fellowship recipient, 1952; Art Service Award, Mt. Morris United Presbyterian Church, New York, 1969; Benin Creative Photography Award, 1972; Artistic and Cultural Achievement Award, Community Museum of Brooklyn, New York, 1979; honorary citizen of Houston, Texas, 1975; honorary doctorate, Rhode Island School of Design, 1985; honorary doctorate, The Maryland Institute, 1986.

Addresses: Home —81 Halsey St., Brooklyn, New York, NY 11216, Agent—Witkin Gallery, 415 West Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

exhibited his first silkscreen prints at a New York gallery in 1947.

DeCarava began using a camera around 1946 to document street images he wanted to paint. He became so involved in chronicling Harlem’s rich street life that he soon abandoned painting and printmaking altogether. The first show of his photographic work was held at the Forty-Fourth Street Gallery in 1950. The gallery’s owner, a photographer himself, taught DeCarava much of what he knew about darkroom technique. Soon his works were championed by no less than 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. In his 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,” according an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune by Mary Abbe.

The Guggenheim fellowship was $3,200, a small fortune in 1952, and DeCarava set out to document 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, that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Studio photographers such as James Van Der Zee documented some of it back then, 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 was 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.”

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 was a watershed event for DeCarava, later hailed as “groundbreaking” and “an achingly beautiful book” by American Visions critic Fern Robinson, and that same year he 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 W. 85th Street, where he sold the works of other photographers who were trying to move from journalism or commercial work to artistic careers.

Worked From Within to End Racism

DeCarava’s career failed to keep 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. He found himself increasingly drawn to musicians as subjects, and liked to listen to 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 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, an undoubtedly lucrative line of work 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 there in 1978, and a distinguished professor after 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 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “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.” Time’s Richard Lacayo saw the retrospective in New York and asserted that DeCarava’s “street pictures speak in the international language of the snapshot aesthetic.” Commenting on the rich tonalities of gray that 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.”

Published Second Book

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 began assembling it 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 greats like Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, and Miles Davis. The New York Times’s Goldberg 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 Sunday journalist David Us-borne called it “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.”

DeCarava stopped documenting the jazz world after a certain point, 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.” But it’s his images of life in New York City that document a truly vanished time. The innate dichotomies of the city abound in them, often accidentally: in “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 his works. It is also one of his favorites, DeCarava told San Francisco Chronicle journalist Sam Whiting. “It was all the hallways I grew up in,” he explained. “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 Hunter College, and lives in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant area neighborhood. His career, he told Usborne in the Independent Sunday interview, 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.”