Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava

1919–2009

Roy DeCarava, who has died at 89, became one of the country’s most acclaimed photographers by creating simple yet striking images of everyday African-American life, especially in Harlem. His most memorable pictures—sweat-stained workers trudging home at day’s end, a girl in an immaculate graduation gown standing in a trash-strewn street—informed white Americans about a world few of them knew.

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The son of a Jamaican-born mother who raised him alone, DeCarava studied art at New York’s Cooper Union and the Harlem Community Art Center, said The New York Times. “He trained to be a painter, but while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work, he began to gravitate toward photography.” DeCarava was drawn by the medium’s “immediacy,” feeling that he could use a camera to convey what he called “a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret.” In 1952 he won a $3,200 Guggenheim Fellowship, the first black photographer to receive the grant.

“Shadow and darkness became hallmarks of DeCarava’s style,” said the Los Angeles Times. “He shot in black and white, creating highly impressionistic images, and printed in a style that produced velvety shades of gray and black.” Among his major works was The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a book with text by Langston Hughes. “The book captures images of a community busy at the art of living: A black matriarch wearing her good hat pauses on the street to give a warm, confident smile. A man in a plaid flannel shirt sits at his kitchen table holding his baby boy.” DeCarava also took many candid shots of such jazz greats as John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis, whom he once captured “stooped over his trumpet like a man in a private conversation.”

DeCarava shot for such magazines as Look, Sports Illustrated, and Life, had retrospectives at many major museums, and received the National Medal of Arts, in 2006. His wife and three daughters survive him.