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“To quote George Orwell: every artist ‘has a ‘message’...”

Interview with the Author: Christian Viveros-Fauné 

A photograph of microphones in a recording studio.

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"A sense of humanity permeates the black-and-white photographs: young boys and girls at play, being groomed or whispering to a parent; couples in animated conversation or holding each other close at a house party; pedestrians heading to work, to school or to the park. And DeCarava’s narrow range of deep tones breathes beautiful life into the black faces of the young and old."

 is a poem celebrating the lives of everyday people. While it’s about listening to a jukebox, about riding the subway alone at night, about children playing at an open fire hydrant, about picket lines and art spaces, this collaboration between artist 

 and writer Langston Hughes evokes a unique and lively visual dialogue in a celebration of creativity and community. DeCarava renders photographic images with richly toned silver light, often at the deeper end of the scale, weaving in Hughes’s words and honoring what the authors saw, knew, and felt deeply about life in their city.

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.

A spread from a book titled, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, published by First Print Press in 2018.

Cover of the publication The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCavara.

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

, ending in the early 1980s, the choice of whether, and how, to make art ‘black’ was a lively issue. And the show—organized by Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, curators at the Tate, and overseen in New York by Ashley James, an assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum — is, among many other things, about the varied and inventive solutions artists came up with.

Certain early responses feel almost counterintuitive. In the same years that [Norman] Lewis was injecting topical stories into abstract painting, Roy DeCarava was experimenting with making photographic portraiture abstract. The face of the young woman in his famous image 

Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963 

has the weight of a monument. But a shot of John Coltrane from the same year has an aura-like blur, and a picture called 

 is a featureless glow, undefined by race or gender."

A detail of a photograph by Roy DeCarava, titled Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., dated 1963. 

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

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"

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.

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.

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.