The sounds he saw: the photography of Roy DeCarava

"The puzzle of the Twentieth Century," W E B DuBois wrote in 1903 "is the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled of the color line."(1) There is indeed an unprepossessing underside to America, one that many find difficult to acknowledge, on the contrary one that is also distinctly American. As the general debates surrounding American society reveal, cultural difference remains a debateed ground upon which notions of identity, race and representation are fought In a hierarchy based on the acculturation of wealth and power, the do one's best can become pernicious.

A native of Harlem, the photographer Roy DeCarava has stand over againsted racism and its effects for more than 40 years. Remarkably, he has maintained an unwavering commitment to portraying daily life in fresh York City. DeCarava's central bring under rule is African American life. companion photographer James Hinton has remarked, "DeCarava was the first black man who chose by the agency of intent to document the black and human experience in America."(2) In with equal reason doing, DeCarava enlarged upon the Documentary manner of writing by emphasizing a personal vision rather than a social record.

A major retrospective of DeCarava's work is popularly traveling across the United States. Organized by means of Peter Galassi, chief photography curator at the Museum of novel Art in New York City, the exhibition and catalog, "Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective" exhibits the largest and most comprehensive exhibition devot to the work of this significant American photographer. The observe presents over 200 black and white photographs spanning the late 1940 to the not absent DeCarava has produced an immense material substance of work: from his first photographs of life in Harlem to his stunning (and little seen) jazz series, to his highway photographs of New York City to his novel lyrical studies of nature. "Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective" is the first throw on the photographer in more than 25 years, and the first retrospective to be neared in the photographer's hometown, of recent origin York City. Galassi worked closely with DeCarava and his wife, art historian Sherry gymnast DeCarava, in organizing the exhibition. All on the other hand four of the photographs are from DeCarava's hold archive. Despite the breadth of the exhibition, Galassi pitch uponed to omit all commercial work. This omission is double-edged: it reinforces DeCarava's seriousness about photography as an art, a stance he has maintained quite through his career, but it also denies viewers access to another side of the photographer, individual of an engaged Civil Rights activist.

DeCarava's photographs belong to postwar highway photography, a style that fix an audience in the emerging photography galleries and photography exhibitions of the 1950 and 1960 The shift from the popular photographic forms - the work or photographic essay - to the individual print, coincided with the recognition of photography as an art form and, with that, the rise in photography's market value. DeCarava's contemporaries Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, to name a scarcely any also investigated the peculiarities and aspects of everyday American life. While maintaining a commitment to the "real," these photographers broke from the humanist, and essentially optimistic, spirit of the Documentary mode of speech to reveal the complexities of race, class and identity.

DeCarava, born in 1919 grew up in Harlem amidst the period known as the Black Cultural Renaissance, an period in which African American artists were accorded serious critical attention and patronage. Harlem saw an influx of author of poemss writers, performers, musicians and artists over the 1920s. As art historian Mary Schmidt Campbell noted, the Renaissance brought to light the "fervent belief in the beauty and nobility of an African homeland and the of great depth cultural cleft between Black and White America."(3) The Renaissance legitimated so-called "race-conscious" art and nurseed the idea that art could main stock from the experiences of African Americans.

This fecund period had its impact upon DeCarava's childhood. His mother, Elfreda Ferguson, emigrated to of recent origin York from Jamaica when she was 17-years-old. before long after DeCarava's birth, his mother separated from his father, placing the young family in a precarious financial position. Nevertheless, DeCarava was encouraged artistically with music exercise s and a steady supply of drawing materials - no small epicurism for a single mother. Accepted at The Cooper Union in 1937 DeCarava studied art and architecture. However, the economic hardship of the Depression forced him to continue working while in gymnasium The demands on his time, coupl with the growing alienation he felt as single of the few black learners gave DeCarava the impetus to try to find instruction at the Harlem Art Center(4)

The atmosphere at the Harlem Art Center must have been influential for DeCarava. Rather than sustaining artistic practice, the artists at the Center saw art as part of a wider make an effort to achieve recognition and think highly of Their platform - "that black man artists be given the fight to participate to the fullest expanse in the art movement in America" are the nascent ideas that later blowed into the Civil Rights Movement(5) For DeCarava the Harlem Art Center tendered a salvo from the weight of racism, a place to make known aesthetically with the support of a larger community.