Roy DeCarava spent much of his life listening to people tell him who he was. “The major definition has been that I’m a documentary photographer,” he told the film-maker Carroll Parrott Blue in 1983. “And then I became a people photographer, and then I became a street photographer, and then I became a jazz photographer.” A pause. “And, oh yes, I mustn’t forget, I am a black photographer. And there’s nothing wrong with any of those definitions. The only trouble is that I need all of them . . . to define myself. I do want to express it all, all of myself.” The word he used to define himself was “artist”.
Today it is likely that an exhibition of DeCarava’s photographs, the subject of which was, for more than 50 years, the lives of black people, will be viewed through a political lens. But this is by no means the whole story. DeCarava, who died in 2009 at the age of 89, grew used to having his work categorised and labelled but, as he consistently and patiently argued, things were more complicated than that.
His black and white photographs are often deceptively simple in their subject matter: affectionate portraits of friends and family in Harlem street scenes and some of the most intuitive photographs of jazz musicians ever made. What distinguishes them is their deep tonality across a range of greys and velvety blacks, which contributes to the emotional depth they convey.
These pictures have been admired by lovers of photography for more than half a century, and exhibited in public galleries and museums since the 1950s. But a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996, which travelled to venues across the country, brought DeCarava to a wider audience, and both his work and his resolute approach to making it would serve as an inspiration to black American artists in the years that followed. Only recently, however, has he received attention from the upper echelons of the commercial art world. In 2018, David Zwirner gallery announced exclusive representation of his estate and, after two critically acclaimed shows at its galleries in New York in 2019, an exhibition opened this week at its London gallery curated by DeCarava’s widow, the art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava.