Roy DeCarava's Lingerie, New York
Roy DeCarava, an American master, died October 27, 2009, a few weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday. Born in Harlem in 1919, and coming to adulthood during the Harlem Renaissance, DeCarava became a photographer of the street and the people who inhabited that day-to-day world. He was good friends with the poet Langston Hughes, and together they collaborated on a book titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Unlike the prints of other photographers who kept their distance, DeCarava's are marked by a warmth that connects the viewer to the subject. They often feel like jazz without sound.
"Roy DeCarava stands as one of the most important American photographers of the twentieth century in part because he took the form of social documentary photography and made it subjective and lyrical," Merry A. Foresta told me as director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative. "As one of the first African American photographers of the modern era, DeCarava depicted black life with an intimacy and sweetness that was unprecedented," she added.
There are nearly a dozen examples of DeCarava's work in American Art's collection. Couple Dancing, New York (1956) portrays a sensual moment, barely lit, private, yet the viewer is allowed to watch. In Lingerie, New York (1950) young children hang out on the stairs and fire escape of what appears to be a shuttered brownstone, the site of the shop La Blanche Lingerie. We are immediately drawn to the boy in tie and suspenders balancing on the window ledge, as if it were the most natural thing in the world--caught perhaps in that sticky, sweet flypaper known as life.
Related post on DeCarava from the Smithsonian's Photography Initiative blog, The Bigger Picture.
