Roy DeCarava: Selected Works

Name: Roy DeCarava: Selected Works
Start: 2022-01-14
End: 2022-02-19
Location: David Zwirner

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Roy DeCarava (1919–2009) at its London location. This will be 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 combines 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 mere chronicle or document and helping it to gain acceptance as an art form in its own right.

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Image: Roy DeCarava, Two women, mannequin’s hand, 1952 (detail)

Location

24 Grafton Street London

Dates

January 14—February 19, 2022

Artist

Roy DeCarava

Press Release

Selected Works

“My photographs are subjective and personal―they’re intended to be accessible, to relate to people’s lives.… People―their well-being and survival―are the crux of what’s important to me.”

—Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava

Two women, mannequin's hand, 1952

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

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“It is one of DeCarava’s first close-up, personal views of people on the street.… An intensely communicative image, we search for some explanation that will bring us from its precipice of anxiety to a more rational world. In one moment it all could have changed, for these women had merely stopped to admire clothes in a store window. Nothing ‘happens’ in this instant, yet everything is happening.”

—Sherry Turner DeCarava, art historian and scholar

Roy DeCarava

Two men talking, lamppost, c. 1977

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

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A lifelong New Yorker, Roy DeCarava drew from his environment to produce a singular collection of black-and-white photographs of modern life that were both personal and universal.

Combining formal sensitivity with an intimate and deeply human treatment of his subject matter, his photographs speak to complex social and aesthetic issues without avoiding the intricacies of each image’s construction.

Roy DeCarava

Skylight, 1965

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

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“His work was, in fact, an exploration of just how much could be seen in the shadowed parts of a photograph, or how much could be imagined into those shadows.”

—Teju Cole, writer and art historian

Roy DeCarava

Coltrane and Elvin, 1960

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

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Having trained as a painter and draftsman, DeCarava first used a camera to gather visual information for his paintings.

By developing and printing his own images, DeCarava created a distinct and enduring aesthetic approach. He worked like a painter but without color or canvas, waiting out time and adjusting tone to allow for what he saw and felt to intensify. DeCarava believed this was the critical work of the darkroom, where the photograph came into its substantive being on its own terms.

Roy DeCarava

Swan feathers, 1991

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

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“[DeCarava’s images are] suffused with a kind of lyrical haze, a propensity for dim light and shadow, and suggest a language of the self, rich in tone, feeling, and abstraction.”

—Bennett Simpson, senior curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Roy DeCarava

Reflection, 1986

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

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Roy DeCarava

Hallway, 1953

Silver gelatin print

Print: 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 20 3/8 x 16 3/8 inches (51.8 x 41.6 cm)

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“DeCarava recognized early on that the process of making a photograph begins long before one even picks up the camera and is not complete until the image has been printed to its inner calling.”

—Roberta Smith, art critic

Roy DeCarava

Exit only, 1975

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

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Roy DeCarava

Haynes, Jones and Benjamin, 1956

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

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“He was composing works of art with light, shadow, and an unapologetic love of silver gelatin’s immersive tonalities—from the brightest rays of light to a scintillating obsidian darkness. He engaged these tones to articulate a shared human identity and community, all while broadly evoking his aesthetic principles.”

—Zoé Whitley, director of Chisenhale Gallery

Roy DeCarava

Moon and branches, 2001

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

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Roy DeCarava

Woman resting, subway entrance, 1952

Silver gelatin print

Print: 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 20 3/8 x 16 3/8 inches (51.8 x 41.6 cm)

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“A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being.”

—Roy DeCarava

Installation view, Roy DeCarava: Selected Works, David Zwirner, London, 2022