I first saw Roy DeCarava's work at his retrospective at the MOMA in 1996 when I was visiting New York and thinking of going to graduate school here. I couldn't believe how prolific his work was: he had been everywhere in Harlem, at every time of day and night. He had captured every jazz and blues club, performers and singers, all types of workers, family life, street life, city life, that Harlem was about. It was like going to see a movie without words.
"He photographed for himself, and ultimately produced a body of work that enshrined the social contradictions of the '50s, the explosion of improvisational jazz music in the '60s, the struggle for social equity, the bold faced stridency of the '70s and '80s, only to turn to even more contemplative realities during the later years of his life," his wife, art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, said in a statement. "His contribution to American photography and culture is manifold," she added.
The show soon traveled to SFMOMA where I was then living and I went to see it again. Later, living in New York and working for a stint at JPMorgan in desktop publishing, I would often tour their vast collection on the upper floors of over 30 of DeCarava's beautiful, fiber based prints.
Originally a painter and illustrator DeCarava chose photography for it's ability to get right to the heart of a thing. “I didn’t know what I wanted to paint, but photography told me right away,” he said in a 1986 interview with The Washington Post. “I was very shy, scared to death of people, and somehow the camera gave me a license, a way of relating to people."
The emotional quality of his images, the nuanced use of black and white, added a deep tenderness to even the roughest or bleakest of images. I love how he privileged the dark tones in his images, exploring every shade of black, with very little white allowed in. “His most enduring pictures dare you to see in the dark,” critic Richard Lacayo wrote in Time magazine. “They’re so heavily shadowed that your eyes have to adjust to the carbon-tone depths.”
