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"An incredible wonder you can almost cradle in your palm"

“Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963 has the weight of a monument."

Enduring Vision- Roy DeCarava Six Decades of American Photography

Explore the Exhibition

September 5—October 26, 2019

Roy DeCarava: Light Break

 concentrates on DeCarava’s photographs of musical subjects. At Zwirner in Chelsea, the much larger 

 treats the full range of his interests, from the civil rights movement to images of urban workers, landscapes and parks. Totaling nearly 150 photographs, this is a museum-worthy undertaking seen in the more accessible, intimate spaces of the commercial gallery—the best of both worlds.

DeCarava’s work is itself the best of both worlds: visually rigorous yet incalculably sensitive to the human predicament and the psychology of everyday life, especially concerning but not limited to African-Americans. He studied painting and printmaking, before committing to the camera, which may have helped him enrich his new medium in terms of both appearance and meaning. DeCarava’s reputation began to grow in the early 1950s, based on his sympathetic portrayals of the residents of Harlem, where he was born in 1919 and raised by a single mother, and of the numerous musical luminaries pursuing blues or jazz, this country’s first modern art. These included Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who figure in the uptown show."

Concurrent exhibitions of Roy DeCarava's work are on view in New York through October 26, 2019: 

 is on view at 533 West 19th Street, and 

A silver gelatin print by Roy DeCarava, titled Curved branch, dated 1994.

The New York Times, Critic's Pick by Roberta Smith

Roy DeCarava: "Visually Rigorous yet Incalculably Sensitive"

"A world that is melodramatic, joyful and heartbreaking all at the same time"

Join Sherry Turner DeCarava for an evening celebrating 

 and writer Langston Hughes that was first published in 1955, the book captures daily life in Harlem through a combination of words and pictures. Widely considered a classic of photographic visual literature,

 was reprinted by public demand several times. This fourth printing is the first authorized English-language edition since 1983, and includes an afterword by the publisher, Sherry Turner DeCarava, tracing the history and continuing importance of the publication.

New York | Shakespeare & Co., 2020 Broadway

The cover of a book, titled, The Sweet Flypaper of Life.

March 19, 2019

The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes

Required Reading for Fall

David Zwirner is pleased to present concurrent exhibitions of photographs by Roy DeCarava (1919–2009) at two of its New York locations: 34 East 69th Street and 533 West 19th Street. This will be the gallery’s first presentation of the artist’s work since announcing exclusive representation of the Estate of Roy DeCarava in 2018. The exhibitions will be accompanied by a new catalogue, copublished by First Print Press and David Zwirner Books, featuring an essay by art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava.

Approaching photography with a painterly aesthetic and leaving behind the standard practices of documentary photography, DeCarava accepted the modernist challenge to understand the medium as an artistic expression and brought an entirely new vocabulary and thinking to the field. He defined his art, not as existing in the polarities of black and white, but as encompassing an infinite scale of gray tonalities, “sliding into each other,” creating new aesthetic challenges for his silver gelatin process. On view uptown will be a selection of photographs from 

 DeCarava’s unwavering decades-long exploration of the relationship between the visual and the aural. Created as an artist-made book in 1960 and never before exhibited in its original form, this work of emotional power and formal mastery is known, in particular, for its finding and explicating a depth of human perception, carried by a nuanced and atmospheric depiction. This photography delivers those known and unknown, including Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and others in their milieu, into a sound and a sense rarely seen in visual arts.

will showcase a dynamic range of images that underscore DeCarava’s subtle mastery of tonal and spatial elements across a wide, fascinating array of subject matter: from the figural implications of smoke and debris to the “shimmering mirror beneath a mother as she walks with her children in the morning light.” Not simply descriptive, as Turner DeCarava notes in her catalogue essay, “The pictures capture a moment of life that slowly unfolds its intimacy with the world—the strong, youthful beauty of a Mississippi freedom marcher, the nature of trees … all rendered through a translucency of surface with palpable detail recorded in the darkest areas.” These photographs express a strength of imagery, an intent to synchronize and honor the pulse of art as an emergent signal for creative freedom, visualizing its revelatory contours.

A photograph by Roy DeCarava, titled Curved Branch, dated 1994.

 by Roy DeCarava & Langston Hughes.
A classic that effortlessly weaves text and image, fact and fiction, the real and the imagined...It is a picture book that should be read from beginning to end, and that takes you in and out of a world that is melodramatic, joyful and heartbreaking all at the same time."

A spread from The Sweet Flypaper of Live, by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes.

a world that is melodramatic joyful and heartbreaking all at the same time

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.