History & Criticism - General & Miscellaneous Photography, Individual Photographers & Professionals, Urban Photography, African Americans - General & Miscellaneous, Portrait Photography - General & Miscellaneous

Roy DeCarava, a retrospective

Name: Roy DeCarava, a retrospective
Author: Sherry Turner DeCarava
ISBN: 9780810961562

by Sherry Turner DeCarava

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Overview

The nearly two hundred superb plates in this book survey a half-century of work by a great American photographer. First applauded for The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a book on life in Harlem with text by Langston Hughes, Roy DeCarava is also known for his extraordinary photographs of jazz musicians - Billie Holiday, Milt Jackson, John Coltrane, and many others. A master of poetic contemplation and of sensual tonalities in black and white, DeCarava is, above all, a photographer of people. In his pictures of couples and children, of men at work and protesters on the march, he presents a compelling unity of private feeling and social conviction. Born in 1919, DeCarava was trained as a painter and printmaker. He turned to photography in the late 1940s and in 1952 won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first awarded to an African-American photographer. His early photographs of life in Harlem, at once tender and unsentimental, announced a powerful new talent. In 1956 he embarked on an extended series of jazz pictures, which in 1983 was exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem as The Sound I Saw. In the early 1960s, photographs of workers in New York's garment district and of civil-rights protests brought a new boldness to his work, as his style became leaner without losing its lyric grace. A life-long New Yorker, DeCarava has almost always worked close to home, making from his own world the expansive world of his art. Since 1975 he has taught photography at Hunter College, where he is Distinguished Professor of Art of the City University of New York. Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, that later will travel to eight leading American museums, Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective makes the full range of the artist's work available for the first time. Its exceptional reproductions convey the subtleties of DeCarava's famously rich prints, and its two essays offer a wealth of new information and interpretation. Peter Galassi, Chief Cura

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Editorials

Library Journal

This survey of a half-century of photographer Roy DeCarava's (b. 1919) drawings, serigraphs, and photographs accompanies a traveling exhibition. DeCarava, the first African American to win a Guggenheim Fellowship (in 1952), illustrated Langston Hughes's The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), yet the only previous monograph on his work is out of print. Here, his wife, art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, provides a perceptive essay about his early life, his first drawings and serigraphs, and the emergence of his expressive, unsentimental, and sometimes abstract photographic style, which makes his work immediately recognizable. Galassi, chief curator of photography for the Museum of Modern Art, surveys DeCarava's career and influences and provides new information on one of the earliest photographic galleries in New York City, A Photographer's Gallery, opened by the DeCaravas in their home. The quality of the works reproduced here, which often focus on black life in New York City, is superb. Highly recommended for photography, black history, and music collections.Kathleen Gail Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn

Ray Olson

That DeCarava was a painter and graphic artist before turning to photography does much to explain the strong lines, extraordinarily rich tonality, and dramatic exploitation of light in his photos. Their emotional charge, however, arises from the social choices DeCarava made for his career. He has expended nearly his entire professional effort upon New York City's black communities. He cherishes the people, places, and events in his pictures and developed early the means to express his affection. He shoots using only ambient light, then prints so as to coax light expressively out of very dark images or, less often, to delineate darker detail in very light ones. The grays in his black-and-white pictures are velvety and warm--qualities he occasionally enhances by purposely shooting out of focus or exposing long enough to show movement. Whether a picture's immediate subject is documentarily realistic or, as in a photo such as "Crushed Can", an abstract form bodied forth in a concrete object, the work is charged with earthy mystery, like a prime Rembrandt painting or a late Michelangelo sculpture in which, because of the artist's rendering of light and mass, life seems to be springing off the canvas, out of the stone, like Adam from the earth on the day of his creation. Like one of his favorite portrait subjects, John Coltrane, DeCarava is one of the transcendently great American artists.