The story goes that Langston Hughes met Roy DeCarava by accident on a street corner in uptown Manhattan in 1954 and was so taken by his photographs of everyday life in Harlem that he took them straight to his publishers. Simon & Schuster agreed to go ahead only if Hughes, who by then had published several novels, plays and poems, provided an accompanying text. The result, which first appeared the following year, was a hybrid book that is now recognised as a pioneering exercise in merging image and text as well as a revealing glimpse into the everyday lives of Harlem’s black community.
Now reissued by First Print Press in association with David Zwirner Books, which recently took creative charge of the DeCarava estate, The Sweet Flypaper of Life continues to cast a singular spell. Revealingly, DeCarava saw himself not as a documentarian, but as a modernist who valued his quest for “creative expression” over any desire to make “a sociological statement”. His approach was quietly subversive in its upending of traditional – and usually reductive – portrayals of black Americans in the mainstream media, where, as he noted, they were often presented “either in a superficial or a caricatured way or as a problem”.
Buoyed by a Guggenheim Fellowship – the first one given to an African American photographer – he spent a year working in Harlem, where he later said: “The people had no walls up. They just accepted me and permitted me to take their photographs without any self-consciousness.”
As its title suggests, The Sweet Flypaper of Life is an extended poem, both visually and verbally. Hughes chose to evoke the Harlem of the 1940s and early 50s through the eyes of Sister Mary Bradley, a grandmother, whose stoical lyricism speaks volumes about her neighbourhood and the wider America of the time. Her gaze, and that of DeCarava, moves from the personal – her family, her neighbours, her wayward grandson, Rodney, his girlfriends – outwards to the neighbourhood characters, children, streets, the disappearing tenements and newly built housing projects.