NEW YORK
One of Roy DeCarava’s strongest childhood memories is of lying abed in neighbors’ homes, struggling to stay awake as he peered at nights of dancing, music making, and camaraderie through half-open doors.
It was in Harlem, in the 1920s, and neighbors often needed help paying their rent. His mother would take him along to rent parties in nearby apartments, where people contributed a quarter and were entertained by amateur or itinerant musicians. Someone would play at an upright piano. If there was no piano, the musicians made do with washboards, saws, and other homemade instruments.
“I can still see it,” he says.
Now one of the most celebrated photographers in the United States, Mr. DeCarava recalls those evenings as he sits in his office here at Hunter College, where he has taught for 23 years. “Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective,” a 190-photograph exhibit, opened at the Museum of Modern Art last year. By the end of its tour, in 1999, the exhibit will have traveled to 10 cities, and already there is talk of extending the show.
Mr. DeCarava, who is 78, takes time to describe his childhood because it helps explain the art he has created as an adult. He was the only child of a single mother, a Jamaican immigrant. “We were on what they called ‘home relief.’ But there was a sense of striving, that if you worked hard you could rise above it. Even within the ghettoization, even within the race situation, there was a sense of overcoming it.”
From his earliest work to his most recent, Mr. DeCarava captures that will to overcome. Perseverance, purpose, and elegance are his themes: A boy stares -- knowing, vulnerable, angry, noble -- in the face of deprivation. A father’s hands wrap around a toddler’s waist, holding the child aloft so that their faces touch. A working man, his shirt soiled, his face set, makes his way up subway stairs. A young woman on her graduation day stands, in a white, billowing gown, amid urban decay. She faces a wall where a poster, shrouded in shadows, bears a line in Spanish: “The scream of a woman in the night.” The young woman stands bathed in sunlight.
Throughout Mr. DeCarava’s work, one notices that distinctive, powerful quality of light. The light is often dim, but it glimmers, redemptively, through dark hues. The photographer achieves that effect, in part, through the use of hand-held cameras and natural lighting. The marriage of dark and light is signature DeCarava: He converts conditions that most photographers would consider obstacles into a means of expression. And he makes no secret of his motive: “There’s always an element of human strength that can smile, if even just for a flicker. I think it’s just the quality of life. It’s a life force that each of us has, a will to live and a will to be here.”
Mr. DeCarava began his artistic career as a high-school student in the poster division of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. After winning the Atlanta University annual, an important national competition for graphic design, he studied painting and lithography at the Cooper Union for two years. He later attended the Harlem Art Center and the George Washington Carver School, another art school in Harlem. Joining in Harlem’s intellectual circles, he came to know such pre-eminent artists of the time as the painters Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden.
At first he took up serigraphs -- a form of silk-screening -- but in 1947, in his late 20s, he decided to concentrate exclusively on photography. At the time, it was not widely accepted as an art form, but Mr. DeCarava embraced it because it provided the tonalities he needed. As opposed to woodblocks or metal engravings, the photographic process includes “no little white lines. It’s just one seamless gradation from black to white,” he says. “And for me, the beauty, the distinctive quality of photography, is this seamless movement from black to white.”
Edward Steichen, the photographer and tireless advocate of the genre’s artistic merit, was so impressed by Mr. DeCarava’s mastery of that subtle gradation, as well as his subject matter, that he became the young man’s champion -- buying his prints and promoting his accomplishments. He also encouraged Mr. DeCarava to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 1952, the artist became the first black photographer to win the prestigious award.
The fellowship came at a crucial point in Mr. DeCarava’s career, a time when he was formulating his artistic goals. In his Guggenheim proposal, he had written: “I want 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, thus revealing the roots from which spring the greatness of all human beings.”
“I want a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret. I want to heighten the awareness of my people and bring to our consciousness a greater knowledge of our heritage.”
Mr. DeCarava’s aesthetic hinges on his largely African-American subject matter and his sense of what he calls “social responsibility” to a particular group of people. “It was unjust that they should go through life unseen,” he says.
His sense of responsibility is central to his best-known work, a collaboration with Langston Hughes on the book The Sweet Flypaper of Life, which was first published in 1955 and is now in its third edition. It contains Hughes’s fictional portrait of a Harlem family, illustrated by 140 DeCarava photographs. The photographs -- neighbors singing, an elderly couple, babies tucked in bed -- emphasize the rewards of family and community life. Those rewards predominate despite the hardships that the photos record in the backgrounds.
Mr. DeCarava is angry about those hardships -- especially racism -- but “I’d rather err on the side of forgiveness than anger,” he says, “because anger can kill you quicker than anything else.”
He considers Sweet Flypaper a crucial part of his life’s work, not only because it advanced his optimistic view of life, but also because it has done the most to publicize his conviction that he can best portray his subject matter artistically rather than through a documentary or sociological approach. In 1969, he and other artists withdrew their work in protest from “Harlem on My Mind,” an exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. They argued that the organizers had ignored their objections that the exhibit would misrepresent Harlem by taking a documentary stance.
Mr. DeCarava makes his distinction between documentary and art clear in his renowned jazz photography. Most of those photos depict well-known figures: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, Ron Carter, Ornette Coleman. But Mr. DeCarava has chosen poses that are far different from snapshots of familiar musicians, on stage or off. His photographs are essentially expressive -- of the musicians’ music and souls.
“I wanted people to realize that in spite of this particularization of their being on stage and performing, they were human beings, with all of the latitudes and grandeur and smallness that allowed them to create this music that we were all listening to,” he says.
As he discusses the portraits in his studio at Hunter College, the music of James P. Johnson, Johnny Hodges, and other jazz greats provides the background. He compiles his favorite jazz recordings on cassette tapes at his home, in Brooklyn, then brings the tapes to the campus and pipes them into the darkroom where his students work. He has taught both undergraduates and candidates for a master’s of fine arts since 1975, and he clearly relishes the work. “I can’t think of another way of making a living that’s as rewarding,” he says.
He has close friends who are jazz musicians, and he plays the saxophone himself. “I like to say I practice,” he says. “I’ve been practicing for 30 years.”
The jazz masters he has seen were of another order, he says. He recalls watching them be transported and transformed by their music: “You see things in musicians and you say, ‘Wow, this guy at some points is somewhere else.’ You can see that. It’s beautiful because it extends the range of human conduct.”
Yet, as in his other photography, Mr. DeCarava does not merely look and record. One memorable photo, for example, captures a rare encounter between Ben Webster and John Coltrane, who span two generations of saxophone mastery. In this close-up image, Coltrane’s head rests on Webster’s shoulder as they embrace. Webster’s arm is around Coltrane’s neck. The eyes of each man are closed. Strikingly, the image is blurred.
Mr. DeCarava came upon the moment almost by chance. One evening in 1960, at a time when he was attending many of Coltrane’s concerts, he happened to be standing outside a New York club, during a break, when Webster showed up. “I anticipated that they were going to come together. They just went to each other and embraced.” They were not well acquainted, but their mutual admiration registers in the photograph.
Still, Mr. DeCarava says, when deciding whether to show the photograph, “even I had difficulty with it. It’s very grainy. It’s very fuzzy.”
But he makes those qualities work. Atomized by the graininess, the two jazz greats seem to merge within the picture. “It had what I felt about it,” he says. “They had embraced each other. I was right there. And that wasn’t going to happen again in a million years, if it ever happened again. This moment.”
The DeCarava retrospective was at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, from January to May, 1996, and then at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. It will be at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from January to April 1998; the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, from June to September 1998; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, from October 1998 to January 1999; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from February to April 1999.