DeCarava, Roy Rudolph

Impact on the world

Rejecting the “social documentary” tradition that had typically photographed Black communities from an outsider's investigative distance, DeCarava set out, in his own words, “to show the strength, the wisdom, the dignity of the Negro people... not the famous and the well known, but the unknown and the unnamed,” developing a signature style of deep shadow and ambient available light that treated ordinary Harlem life as worthy of serious artistic attention; his 1952 Guggenheim Fellowship — the first ever awarded to a Black photographer — funded a year documenting Harlem that became The Sweet Flypaper of Life, paired with text by Langston Hughes, now considered a landmark of photographic literature. He opened A Photographer's Gallery in his own apartment from 1955-57, one of the first spaces in the country dedicated to fine-art photography, co-founded the influential Kamoinge Workshop collective for Black photographers in 1963, spent years as a working photojournalist for Newsweek, Look, Life, and Sports Illustrated while chairing a national committee fighting discrimination against Black photographers, and received the National Medal of Arts in 2006.

Life & background

Born December 9, 1919, in Harlem, the only child of a Jamaican mother and American father who separated when he was young, DeCarava studied art at Cooper Union from 1938 to 1940 before transferring to the Harlem Community Art Center amid what he described as racial hostility from white classmates, studying alongside future luminaries Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence and encountering poet Langston Hughes. He served in the U.S. Army as a topographical draftsman during World War II, worked as a WPA sign painter and screen printer before turning to photography in the mid-1940s as a tool for his painting, and had his first solo photography exhibition in 1950, where MoMA photography curator Edward Steichen discovered and began championing his work. He taught for decades at Cooper Union and Hunter College, married three times, and died in New York City on October 27, 2009, at age 89; his complete archive is now held by the Library of Congress.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; National Endowment for the Arts; BlackPast.org