Roy DeCarava

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roy DeCarava (born December 9, 1919) is a Master American photographer.

Roy DeCarava was born in Harlem in December of 1919, and lived there through many decades of important changes to the neighborhood. In DeCarava’s youth, Harlem was cultivating its reputation as a flourishing African American neighborhood, and he came of age during a time when many prominent black artists, musicians and writers were in their prime. He was close to poet Langston Hughes, and would later publish a book with him titled, The Sweet Flypaper of Life[1], which chronicled the lives of Harlem residents.

DeCarava was raised by his single mother, and to earn money he began working at an early age. He continued to hold odd jobs throughout most of his career as a photographer. Through diligence and hard work, he secured admission to The Cooper Union, but left after two years to attend classes at the Harlem Art Center. Deciding early on that he wanted to be an artist, he began working as a painter and commercial illustrator, and many of his early photographs were meant only as reference for serigraph prints. He was drawn to photography by “the directness of the medium”, and he soon found himself communicating the themes and ideas of his paintings photographically.

While many still regarded photography as a documentary medium, and as a result a great visual lexicon of photojournalism was created by so-called street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Helen Levitt. DeCarava, however, has never considered himself of this tradition. Rather his work harkens to the intense visual imagery and tones that influenced him as an early painter and graphic artist. 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.

The strong lines, extraordinarily rich tonality, and exploration of light in his work charge his photographs with earthy mystery, like a prime Rembrandt painting (Rembrandt was an early influence) 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.

DeCarava worked for a time at Sports Illustrated magazine, but found it difficult to adjust his style and schedule to the constraints of commercial work. He did a series on the set of Requiem for a Heavyweight in 1962, which the director liked so much he bought nearly 200 prints. Despite his successes DeCarava felt very strongly about maintaining the artistic integrity of his images, and eventually gave up magazine and freelance work in order to take on a job teaching at Hunter College, where he is still a distinguished member of the faculty. In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

[edit] Works consulted

[The Sound I Saw][2]. Phaidon Press, 2000
Roy DeCarava, A Retrospective. Museum of Modern Art New York, NY 1996
Roy DeCarava, Photographs. Edited by James Alinder, Friends of Photography, 1981.