DeCarava, Roy

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DeCarava, Roy

December 9, 1919

The photographer Roy DeCarava was born in New York's Harlem. He was raised by his mother and graduated with a major in art from the Straubenmuller Textile High School in 1938. While still in high school he worked as a sign painter and display artist and in the poster division of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) in New York City. In his senior year he won a competition to design a medal for the National Tuberculosis Association's high school essay contest and upon graduation received a scholarship for excellence in art.

Supporting himself as a commercial artist, DeCarava studied painting at Cooper Union with Byron Thomas and Morris Kantor from 1938 to 1940, and lithography and drawing at the Harlem Art Center from 1940 to 1942. He attended the George Washington Carver Art School in 1944 and 1945, studying painting with Charles White. In 1946 his serigraph won the print award at the Atlanta University Fifth Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture (a national juried exhibition for black artists), and the following year he had a one-man show at the Serigraph Gallery in New York.

In 1946 DeCarava began to use photography as a way to sketch ideas for paintings, and by 1947 he had decided to concentrate exclusively on it. Although he lacked formal training, DeCarava approached photography as "just another medium that an artist would use"; he quickly established a distinctive style and chose a subject—the people of Harlem—that engaged him deeply and productively. Some of his strongest work dates from the late 1940s and early 1950s, including Graduation (1949) and Gittel (1950). His first photographic exhibition was in 1950 at New York's Forty-Fourth Street Gallery, and that year he sold three prints to the Museum of Modern Art. In 1952 DeCarava became the tenth photographer and among the earliest black artists to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Continuing his work in Harlem during the fellowship year, DeCarava produced over 2,000 images; he wanted to show, he said, "[African Americans'] beauty and the image that we presented in our being." In 1955 four of his photographs appeared in the Museum of Modern Art's famous Family of Man exhibition and best-selling book. In the same year, 141 photographs were published with a text by Langston Hughes in their much-acclaimed classic The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a tale of everyday events in the lives of a fictional yet representative Harlem family.

DeCarava formed his style at a time in photographic history when the social documentary ethos of the 1930s

was giving way to a more formalist aesthetic, which especially appreciated a photographer's manipulation of the unique qualities of the medium. He was influenced by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose theory of the "decisive moment" credits formal organization equally with factual content in conveying essential meaning in a photograph. Like Cartier-Bresson, DeCarava uses a small camera, avoids contrived settings, often shooting in the street, and achieves important, often metaphorical, effects through composition, as in Sun and Shade (1952) and Boy Playing, Man Walking (1966). Indeed, DeCarava has taken pains throughout his career to foster interpretations that see more in his style than literal and programmatic documentary. His titles are always brief and uninflected, and he insists that his work is not political and that "the definition of truth is a personal one." Dismayed that so few galleries showed photography as a fine art, DeCarava operated the Photographer's Gallery from 1954 to 1956, exhibiting work by such artists as Berenice Abbott, Harry Callahan, and Minor White.

DeCarava felt keenly that black people were not seen as "worthy subject matter" for art; he was determined that African Americans be portrayed in ways that were "serious," "artistic," and "human." His dual commitment—to

content representing the beauty and diversity of the African-American experience and to full formal mastery of his medium—has deeply influenced younger photographers, who have seen him as the first to develop the black aesthetic in photography. From 1963 to 1966, he directed the Kamoinge Workshop for black photographers and chaired the Committee to End Discrimination against Black Photographers of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. In 1968 DeCarava picketed the Metropolitan Museum of Art's controversial Harlem on My Mind exhibition, protesting its emphasis on documentary, rather than artistic, representation of the Harlem community. In 1972 DeCarava received the Benin Award for contributions to the black community.

DeCarava's work was included in six group shows at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1950s and 1960s, and he had a one-man show at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1969. In 1958 he gave up commercial art to support himself as a freelance photographer for magazines, advertising agencies, museums, and nonprofit organizations. From 1968 to 1975, DeCarava was a contract photographer for Sports Illustrated magazine, and in 1975 he was appointed associate professor of art at Hunter College, attaining the rank of City University distinguished professor in 1989.

DeCarava's impressive exhibition record continued in the 1970s and 1980s with solo shows at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in Sweden. The Sound I Saw, an exhibition of 100 jazz photographs at the Studio Museum in Harlem, was accompanied by a publication of the same title (1983). In 1982, the Friends of Photography published Roy DeCarava: Photographs, a major monograph with eighty-two pictures.

In the course of his career DeCarava has traveled and photographed in Paris, London, Stockholm, and Bangkok. His developing interest in abstraction has suggested to some critics that he feels an increasing emotional detachment from his subjects. Most viewers, however, have appreciated the artist's occasional experiment with blur or soft focus in later work as evidence of his ongoing creative exploration of his medium.

A retrospective of DeCarava's works was held at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1996. More recent photographs were exhibited in a commercial gallery showing at Ariel Meyerowitz (New York City) in 2004.

See also Art; Harlem, New York; Photography, U.S.

Bibliography

Coleman, A. D. "Roy DeCarava: 'Thru Black Eyes.'" In Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings, 1968–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 18–28.

DeCarava, Sherry Turner. "Celebration." In Roy DeCarava: Photographs. Carmel, Calif.: Friends of Photography, 1981, pp. 7–20.

Fraser, C. Gerald. "For Roy DeCarava, 62, It's Time for Optimism." New York Times, June 6, 1982.

Rachleff, Melissa. "The Sounds He Saw: The Photography of Roy DeCarava." Afterimage 24, no. 4 (January–February 1997).

Robinson, Fern. "Masterful American Photographer Roy DeCarava." American Visions 14, no. 6 (December 1999).

Stange, Maren. "Shadow and Substance." Art in America 84, no.3 (March 1996).

Wallen, Ruth. "Reading the Shadows: The Photography of Roy DeCarava." Exposure 27, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 13–26.