Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective

Author: Peter Galassi, Sherry Turner DeCarava
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Year: 1996
Pages: 280
ISBN: 978-0870701276

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 oth ers. 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 children, of men at work and protesters on the murch, he presents a compelling unity of private feeland 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 ten der 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 exception al 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 Curator at the Museum, traces the evolution of DeCarava's work and career, including such neglected episodes as the pioneering photography gallery he established in the 1950s. Sherry Turner DeCarava, an art historian, curator, and the author of several essays on her husband's work — including that in the Friends of Photography monograph Roy DeCarava: Photographs (1981)— offers new insight into its develop ment by reaching back to his earliest artistic efforts, before he turned to photography.