Word: decaravas
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WHEN HE STARTED TAKING PICtures around New York City in the late 1940s, Roy DeCarava stepped into the most irresistible role that photography offers: a walker in the city, a camera-equipped descendant of the quick-witted literary strollers that the French called flaneurs. Looking out for the knotty surprises the street has in store, he was like Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris or Harry Callahan in Chicago. What was different for DeCarava was that most of his streets were in Harlem, which made him a roving eye in a part of town that the rest of the world didn...
...most of his career DeCarava, who was born in 1919, has been a freelance photographer. He was 35 when he had his first critical and commercial success, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a 1955 book that combines his pictures of Harlem life with text by the poet Langston Hughes. If the book is sometimes guilty of the blandness of concerned photography, it also contains pictures that mark the beginning of DeCarava's best work, most of which dates from the 1950s and '60s. His street pictures speak in the international language of the snapshot aesthetic. Figures...
Maybe his fondness for the bonds of community explains why so many of his other streetscapes are warmer than comparable pictures by other great names in the same tradition. For the most part DeCarava is less gloomy than Robert Frank, less chilly than Garry Winogrand. What he likes is the way the flouncing liner of a woman's overcoat rhymes with a slice of sunlight as she steps down a stairway. Even though the top of the frame cuts off the upper half of her body, she's not altogether anonymous. He still lets us sense her aplomb...
What the painter Ad Reinhardt did in his black-on-black abstractions of the 1950s, DeCarava does with these photographs, teasing out the psychological and spiritual powers of darkness. One thing shadows tell you is that nothing worth knowing is instantly fathomable. When DeCarava is at his best, he sees things in that light...
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