David, 1952. (c) 1984, the Estate of Roy DeCarava
Woman resting, subway entrance, 1952. (c) 1984, the Estate of Roy DeCarava
Photographer ROY DeCARAVA in New Exhibition at AIPAD
The photographic works of Roy DeCarava will be presented at The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) Armory Show New York, one of the world’s most highly anticipated annual photography events during the week of April 9 – April 13, 2014. Jenkins Johnson Gallery, drawing exclusively from the collection of The DeCarava Archives, will feature the largest selection of DeCarava photographs since his 2006 exhibition in New York.
Roy DeCarava (1919-2009) was one of the great originals of twentieth-century American art. He has influenced generations of image-makers and profoundly shaped our understanding of the people and places he photographed. Over his six decade-long career, Roy DeCarava created photographs that embody a rich and esthetic world of sense and thought, extraordinary moments made visible in light and darkness through the medium of silver. He produced images that have gained audience as classic pictures noted for their visual exploration of the emotional timbre of a city and the inner life of its inhabitants. While working almost exclusively in silver gelatin, he eschewed the standard schools of photographic thought as he was not a documentarian nor did he engage the ethos of street photography or the “New York School.” He defined a distinct position in American art, one that was also inclusive of others (with diverse subjects and visions) such as Irving Penn and the modernist Harry Callahan. DeCarava quietly maintained that photography as an art was far more than the sum of its mechanical parts, that it was uniquely amenable to his deepening sensibilities and he became the first African American photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952. Fully immersed in this world, he discovered a working process that summons imagery into elegiac metaphor and resonance.
The current exhibition presents his work for the first time at AIPAD and is curated by art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, his partner and archivist since the 1960s who has spoken about the "sacred geometry of his pictures and an imagery deeply rooted in humanistic thought." The photographs speak of the search for meaning and oasis; and they forge new connections between people and their environments, however tenuous we may view relationships to be. DeCarava effectively shifts and upends expectations by setting the viewer on a journey that substantively addresses the African American experience as important to artistic discovery and expresses one definition of himself among many he considered relevant. Exclusively capturing by natural light and working without assistants, DeCarava printed his own photographs throughout his career. This unique collection includes a strong selection of vintage prints whose patina and tonal range highlight the mastery of his printing process. Such qualities give agency to many of the photographs, from the illumination of a young child whose face summons echoes of African art to the photographer’s pursuit of an uncharted cosmos in the optical mystery of a subway station. In this manner, he creates images that achieve, without losing their daring impulse, both a resolute quality of truth and a poised visual elegance.
Few artists photographed the common man as a complex individual, a carrier of beauty, like Roy DeCarava. Beginning in 1955 his work was featured in the historic exhibition, The Family of Man, shown in eighty-eight venues in thirty-seven countries on six continents.
His 1969 exhibition Thru Black Eyes: Photographs by Roy DeCarava at The Studio Museum in Harlem was a milestone exhibition for African American photographers.
DeCarava, a native New Yorker, began his artistic endeavors as a painter after attending The Cooper Union School of the Arts. Soon thereafter he found photography and a career spanning over half a century.
In addition to the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, he has published numerous photo essays and five books, including the award-winning pictorial he co-authored with the poet Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life. DeCarava’s work has appeared in nearly twenty solo and group exhibitions at museums around the globe, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, The Chicago Art Institute, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Modern Museet Fotografiska (Sweden). This includes the 1996 exhibition Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective that commenced at the Museum of Modern Art, and traveled throughout the United States.
His work was last seen in Blues for Smoke, an exhibition in partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and the artist Glenn Ligon in 2013.
DeCarava’s life and work, the subject of a Charlie Rose interview and a solo PBS documentary film, has received much professional recognition. Among his awards were the National Medal of Arts in 2006, the Century Award in Photography from the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, and the Master of Photography Award of the International Center of Photography, New York. He and his partner were honored with the international Rencontre d’Arles Book Award (France) for the best photography and interpretive text published in 1981. His last book, “the sound i saw,” representing thirty years of his jazz photography, was published in paperback in 2004 (Phaidon Press). DeCarava was a Distinguished Professor of Art at Hunter College, C.U.N.Y. for over 30 years.
“My pictures are immediate and yet at the same time, they’re forever. They present a moment so profoundly a moment, it becomes an eternity. . . there’s an arc of being.” --- Roy DeCarava
Graduation, 1952. (c) 1984, the Estate of Roy DeCarava
Couple walking, Park Avenue, 1960 (c) 1984, the Estate of Roy DeCarava
Platform and light, 1948 (c) 2014, the Estate of Roy DeCarava
The Sherry and Roy DeCarava (TM) Archives
Content copyright 2022 The Estate of Roy DeCarava and Sherry Turner DeCarava. All rights reserved. ROY DeCARAVA is a trademark of Sherry Turner DeCarava and the DeCarava Estate. All images copyright Sherry Turner DeCarava and the DeCarava Estate.
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