Roy DeCarava
Born in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in 1919, Roy DeCarava came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, when artistic activity and achievement among African Americans flourished across the literary, musical, dramatic, and visual arts. DeCarava did not take up photography until the late 1940s, after working in painting and making prints for the posters division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He used his camera to produce striking studies of everyday black life in Harlem, capturing the varied textures of the neighborhood and the creative efflorescence of the Harlem Renaissance. Resisting explicit politicization, DeCarava used photography to counter what he described as “black people...not being portrayed in a serious and artistic way.”1
DeCarava moved fluidly across subjects. In his series The Sound I Saw (begun in 1956, exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983, and published as a book in 2001), he not only chronicled New York jazz luminaries like Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, and John Coltrane, but also captured their influence on visual culture. The deeply personal style of his portraits evinces his sympathy for his subjects. Noting this, publisher and photographer Alan Thomas commented on DeCarava’s “gentle humanism.”2
DeCarava’s Harlem photography of the late 1940s and early 1950s garnered the attention of Edward Steichen, who was then director of MoMA’s Department of Photography. At Steichen’s urging, DeCarava applied for and won a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship in 1952, becoming the first African American photographer to receive this honor. The fellowship enabled him to spend a year shooting hundreds of photographs documenting Harlem life. Steichen included several of DeCarava’s photographs in MoMA’s landmark 1955 exhibition The Family of Man. That same year, DeCarava collaborated with poet, writer, and social activist Langston Hughes to produce The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book featuring 140 of his photographs accompanied by a narrative written by Hughes.
Avoiding the overtly documentary approach evident in the photography of, for instance, James Van Der Zee or Gordon Parks, DeCarava combined pointed political commentary with aesthetic and formal rigor. His attraction to moody lighting and darker tones is clear in works like Man Coming Up Subway Stairs, a photograph for which he spent many hours searching for the perfect subject. As he once described, he strove for “the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which...only a Negro photographer [could] interpret.”3
Introduction by Swagato Chakravorty, Museum Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Media and Performance Art, 2016
Randy Kennedy, “Roy DeCarava, Harlem Insider Who Photographed Ordinary Life, Dies at 89,” New York Times, October 28, 2009, accessed June 10, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/arts/29decarava.html.
Alan Thomas, “Literary Snapshots of the Sho-Nuff Blues,” In These Times, March 27–April 2, 1985, 21.
Randy Kennedy, “Roy DeCarava, Harlem Insider Who Photographed Ordinary Life, Dies at 89,” New York Times, October 28, 2009, accessed June 10, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/arts/29decarava.html.
- Introduction
- Roy Rudolph DeCarava (December 9, 1919 – October 27, 2009) was an African American artist. DeCarava received early critical acclaim for his photography, initially engaging and imaging the lives of African Americans and jazz musicians in the communities where he lived and worked. Over a career that spanned nearly six decades, DeCarava came to be known as a founder in the field of black and white fine art photography, advocating for an approach to the medium based on the core value of an individual, subjective creative sensibility, which was separate and distinct from the "social documentary" style of many predecessors.
- Wikidata
- Q2475981
- Introduction
- Roy DeCarava, best known as a photographer, recorded the Harlem in which he grew up. He was trained at the Harlem Community Art Center from 1940-1942, but left to serve in the United States Army as a topographical draftsman in 1943. Then, in 1944-1945 he took classes at the George Washington Carver Art School. DeCarava is best known as a photographer, but he produced a variety of artworks with different mediums.
- Nationalities
- American, African American
- Gender
- Male
- Roles
- Artist, Commercial Artist, Illustrator, Photographer, Sign Painter
- Names
- Roy DeCarava, Roy De Carava, Roy Rudolph DeCarava, Rudolph DeCarava
- Ulan
- 500095793
Exhibitions
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402: In and Around Harlem
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape
Oct 21, 2019–Oct 4, 2020
MoMA
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The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook
Apr 16, 2012–Apr 21, 2013
MoMA
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Photography Rotation 8
May 13, 2011–Mar 12, 2012
MoMA
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Abstract Expressionist New York
Oct 3, 2010–Apr 25, 2011
MoMA
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Roy DeCarava has
22 exhibitionsonline.
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Roy DeCarava Jake, Age Seven 1946
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Roy DeCarava No Work Today 1946
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Roy DeCarava Palma 1947
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Roy DeCarava Graduation 1949
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Roy DeCarava Self-Portrait 1950
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Roy DeCarava Close up 1949-50
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Roy DeCarava Sun and Shade 1952
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Roy DeCarava Man Coming Up Subway Stairs 1952
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Roy DeCarava Boy, Woman's Hand on Shoulder 1952
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Roy DeCarava Child Playing at Curb, Eighth Avenue 1952
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Roy DeCarava Shirley Embracing Sam 1952
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Roy DeCarava Self-Portrait 1956
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Roy DeCarava Strikers c. 1951
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Roy DeCarava Mahalia Jackson, Singing 1957
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Roy DeCarava Man with Portfolio 1959
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Roy DeCarava Bed 1960
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Roy DeCarava David 1964
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