He photographed the neighborhood he was born in, printed his pictures darker than anyone thought he should, and insisted he was an artist rather than a documentarian.
If you care about black and white photography and have never spent time with the work of Roy DeCarava, you are in for something special. He was born in Harlem in 1919, and for most of his long life he photographed the people and streets around him, the families in their apartments, kids playing on the sidewalk, commuters on the subway stairs, and the jazz musicians who filled the clubs. He died in New York in 2009, and today he is recognized as one of the great American photographers of the twentieth century. People often call him a poet, and once you have looked at his pictures for a while, the word makes sense.
A painter who picked up a camera
DeCarava did not start out as a photographer. He studied painting at Cooper Union and then at the Harlem Art Center and the George Washington Carver School, and his first serious work was as a painter and printmaker. He began using a camera to make reference pictures for his paintings, and over time he realized the photographs had become the work itself. That background never left him. His pictures are built the way a painter builds a canvas, with careful attention to shape, to the weight of dark areas against light ones, and to the way a whole frame feels rather than just what it shows.
In 1952 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first African American photographer ever to do so. He used the year to photograph everyday life in Harlem, and many of his best known pictures come from that time. A few years later, a selection of them appeared in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a small book published in 1955 with a story written by Langston Hughes. It became one of the most loved photobooks of its era, and it showed Harlem the way the people who lived there knew it, full of warmth, family and ordinary days, at a time when most published pictures of the neighborhood focused on poverty and crime.
The darkness in his prints
The first thing most people notice about a DeCarava print is how dark it is. Where many photographers of his time aimed for a full range from bright white to deep black, he let his pictures live mostly in the lower tones, in shades of charcoal and gray that you have to lean in to read. His famous Hallway from 1953 shows a narrow tenement corridor lit by a single bulb, and almost the entire frame sits in shadow. It is not underexposed. It is exactly as dark as he wanted it to be, and the darkness is where the feeling comes from, a sense of closeness and quiet and a little bit of dread.
It is hard not to see more than mood in that choice. DeCarava was photographing Black people at a time when film and printing were largely calibrated around lighter skin, and he never brightened his prints just to make them easier for other people to read. In his pictures, dark tones are not something to be corrected. They are full of detail, texture and life if you give them your attention, and that feels as meaningful today as it did then.
Not a documentarian
Because he photographed real people in a real neighborhood, DeCarava was often described as a documentary photographer. He rejected that label firmly. He said his work was creative expression, not a documentary or sociological statement, and the distinction mattered to him. He was not trying to explain Harlem to outsiders or make a case about living conditions. He was trying to capture the feeling of a moment and the inner life of the people in it. Sun and Shade from 1952 shows two small boys playing on a sidewalk, split between bright light and deep shadow. It is a simple scene, but it plays out like a small poem about light, childhood and the city. Man Coming up Subway Stairs, made the same year, shows a man in a hat hauling himself up by the handrail, and turns an ordinary commute into something heavy and almost weary.
Music was just as important to him. For years he photographed jazz musicians, including John Coltrane, Billie Holiday and many others, often in dim clubs and rehearsal rooms where there was barely enough light to work. Those pictures, collected much later in the book The Sound I Saw, feel improvised in the best sense, loose, intimate and full of movement. His Dancers from 1956 has the same energy, two dancers in silhouette crossing a dark, gleaming ballroom floor while a crowd watches from the edges.
Making room for others
DeCarava also spent a great deal of energy making space for other photographers. From 1955 to 1957 he ran A Photographer’s Gallery out of his own home on the Upper West Side, one of the first galleries in the country devoted to photography as art. In 1963 he helped found the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers in New York, and served as its first director. He later taught for many years at Hunter College. The Museum of Modern Art gave him a major retrospective in 1996, and in 2006 he received the National Medal of Arts.
What his pictures teach us
For black and white photographers, DeCarava’s work is a lesson in trusting the dark end of the scale. So many of us are taught to chase a full tonal range and to pull detail out of every shadow. He showed that a photograph can live almost entirely in the lower tones and be richer for it, as long as the darkness is doing something. His work is also a reminder that the subject closest to us is often the one we are best placed to photograph. He did not need to travel to find his pictures. He found them on his own block, among his own neighbors, because he knew them well enough to see what outsiders walked past.
His photographs are still under copyright, so we cannot show them here, but the links above will take you to several of them in museum collections. They are worth the click. Spend a few minutes with them, and you will see why people reach for the word poet when they talk about Roy DeCarava.
Featured photograph: Roy DeCarava in a 1984 PBS publicity photograph, public domain.