Get To Know, Roy R. DeCarva

Known for his mastery of the dark tones in his prints, Mr. DeCarva was born in Harlem, New York City, in 1919. He studied painting and printmaking, using a camera only to document his work, but at some point the shutter called to him more often than the brush. He started documenting daily life of the African-Americans in his neighborhood and grew to believe that a sensitive, sophisticated images could only be produced by a Negro (which was the vocabulary of the era).

At his first solo exhibition, Edward Steichen bought three prints for the Museum of Modern Art. He was the first African-American to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Images resulting from this award resulted in the 1955 book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, with text by Langston Hughes. Believing that photography should be promoted as an art, he opened A Photographer’sGallery—one of the first showing photography at all—and mounted exhibitions of works by Bernice Abbott, Harry Callahan, and MInor White. For about the following ten years, he worked on a series of jazz musicians such as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane.