Roy DeCarava (1919–2009) was born in New York and first studied art in the city’s public schools, including at Textile High School, from which he graduated with honors in 1938. He subsequently worked in the poster division of the Works Progress Administration, where he briefly made prints and paintings, prior to being admitted to The Cooper Union. DeCarava studied there until 1940, when he left to attend classes uptown at Harlem Community Art Center (1940–1942) and George Washington Carver Art School (1944–1945), where his elder professional contemporaries included Norman Lewis and Charles White, among others. Some of his earliest influences during this time included the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
This is the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in London in over thirty years and the first presentation of his photographs in the city since inclusion in Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition in 2017.
Over the course of six decades, DeCarava produced a singular collection of black-and-white silver gelatin photographs that combine formal acuity with an intimate and deeply human treatment of his subjects. His pioneering work privileges the aesthetic qualities of the medium, providing a counterpoint to the prevailing view of photography as a mere chronicle or document and helping it to gain acceptance as an art form in its own right.
Having trained as a painter and draughtsman, DeCarava began working with the camera in the mid-1940s, seeking an inclusive artistic statement for the culturally diverse uptown Manhattan neighborhood of his Harlem youth. Working without assistants and rejecting standard techniques of photographic manipulation, DeCarava honed his printing technique to produce rich tonal gradations, enabling him to explore a full spectrum of light- and dark-grey values more akin to a painterly mode of expression.
Relying on ambient light and a point of view that neither monumentalizes nor renders sentimental his subjects, DeCarava was able to produce a highly original oeuvre that carries significant visual and emotional content. His work reveals transcendent values of the human figure and continues to evolve in the context of the everyday experience of social improvisations. Avoiding being an emblematic totem, the work is a sustained personal exploration of human ingenuity. The search for beauty within this modern conundrum is the hallmark of his work, and achieving a vibrant and meditative voice, he remains a central beacon for contemporary artists.
For more information, visit the David Zwirner website. The show, which started on January 14, runs until February 19, 2022
Image: Roy DeCarava, Two women, mannequin’s hand, 1952 © The Estate of Roy DeCarava.
All rights reserved. Courtesy David Zwirner
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