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Roy DeCarava, 1919–2009
November 12, 2009
Roy DeCarava's Lingerie, New York
Roy DeCarava, an American master, died October 27, 2009, a few weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday. Born in Harlem in 1919, and coming to adulthood during the Harlem Renaissance, DeCarava became a photographer of the street and the people who inhabited that day-to-day world. He was good friends with the poet Langston Hughes, and together they collaborated on a book titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Unlike the prints of other photographers who kept their distance, DeCarava's are marked by a warmth that connects the viewer to the subject. They often feel like jazz without sound.
"Roy DeCarava stands as one of the most important American photographers of the twentieth century in part because he took the form of social documentary photography and made it subjective and lyrical," Merry A. Foresta told me as director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative. "As one of the first African American photographers of the modern era, DeCarava depicted black life with an intimacy and sweetness that was unprecedented," she added.
There are nearly a dozen examples of DeCarava's work in American Art's collection. Couple Dancing, New York (1956) portrays a sensual moment, barely lit, private, yet the viewer is allowed to watch. In Lingerie, New York (1950) young children hang out on the stairs and fire escape of what appears to be a shuttered brownstone, the site of the shop La Blanche Lingerie. We are immediately drawn to the boy in tie and suspenders balancing on the window ledge, as if it were the most natural thing in the world--caught perhaps in that sticky, sweet flypaper known as life.
Related post on DeCarava from the Smithsonian's Photography Initiative blog, The Bigger Picture.
Posted by Howard on November 12, 2009 in American Art Everywhere, American Art Here
Comments
I had never heard of Roy DeCarava until I came across your site. I love the way he did his work though --capturing life like it was back in the day.
Posted by: Gavin Boyd | Nov 17, 2009
So I must say I didn’t know much about DeCarva himself except that he created sumptuous pictures of people in the streets of Harlem. After reacquainting myself with the work, it’s easy to see that he was much less interested in documentation than he was in creating art. It also occurs to me that the content, in my opinion, mattered much less than the composition of his pictures. And true enough, the elegance of the work came through because lyricism was not something he was searching for; it was already in his soul. Howard said it perfectly: “[his pictures] often feel like jazz without sound.”
It is not surprising that he began his work as an artist by studying painting and thus began, I imagine, his fascination with the structure of an image. So by the time he picked up a camera, his eyes were already focused on the kinds of images he wanted to make. Instead of colors, he juxtaposed light and dark, to dramatize a kind of elegance most people never see.
Content matters in art. Who wants to look at something they’ve seen a million times? But when ordinary life is depicted as something other than ordinary, then we’re on to something. Finally, it’s all about how the picture is pictured. If only more “artists” were concerned with the consistency of their own vision, the impact they long to make would inevitably be realized.
“A good picture isn’t out there” is something I always say to the many commercial photographers/wanna-be artists I meet. It has to come from something that’s already in you.
Posted by: Norma Jean Markus | Nov 19, 2009
Thanks Gavin. I think DeCarava's work resonates.
Posted by: Howard | Nov 20, 2009
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