In 1955, just as the celebrated Family of Man exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art in NY, Simon and Schuster published The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a small volume of photographs by Roy DeCarava with text by Langston Hughes. While Family of Man was later on widely criticized as an attempt to show the universality of human actions in daily life regardless of race and class, The Sweet Flypaper of Life remains a lauded title that conveys Harlem as a microcosm within the larger city. DeCarava's images and Hughes's text offer a record of the transformation of black life from rural to urban in the early-to-mid-20th Century, and the social and personal trauma associated with that transition.
The streets DeCarava shows us are real, dirty, broken oil stained sidewalks; there's water running, tenements torn down and newly built housing projects. Instead of the dream of Harlem, we are shown the reality of poverty associated with this heterotopic space. Yet, as Hughes's narrator repeatedly tells us, "there is so much to see in Harlem!"
In 1952, Harlem-born-and-raised DeCarava was the first African-American photographer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship, yet initial attempts to publish his work were declined by publishers, claiming that they were too radical and subversive to make a profit, even while acknowledging their artistic brilliance. It was only after Hughes, by then a well-established poet and writer, stepped in, following a chance encounter with the photographer on the street, that they were able to create a marketable package. Re-released in 2018 by First Print Press in association with David Zwirner Books, the original paperback edition went on to sell over 35,000 copies within its first year.
n DeCavara's Graduation (1949) a bride-like figure crosses the frame divided into starkly contrasting angles of light and darkness. As she faces the afternoon sun in her white gown, adorned with flowers in her hair, she is isolated in a vacant lot covered with rubble and trash. The young woman's coming-of-age is likened to that of Harlem's, full of promise and hope for the future, yet verging on the uncertainty of shadow: the era of desegregation and struggle for human rights that is yet to come. The image reflects this transitional historical moment in a quietly subversive way.