Roy DeCarava

Roy Rudolph DeCarava was born in Harlem on the ninth of December 1919, the son of a Jamaican immigrant single mother. He took his early art education at the Cooper Union School of Art (1938-40), the Harlem Community Art Center under Charles White (also placed in this archive), and George Washington Carver Art School. He shifted from painting to photography in 1947.

In 1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. His fellowship application — to photograph the everyday life of Harlem with respect rather than as a sociological problem — produced over two thousand negatives from 1952 to 1954. Approximately one hundred and forty of these were paired with text by Langston Hughes (also placed in this archive) and published in 1955 as The Sweet Flypaper of Life. The book sold twenty-five thousand copies in its first year and was reissued continuously across the following six decades.

DeCarava also documented the New York jazz scene of the 1950s and 1960s. His photographs of John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young — all placed in this archive in successive waves — were collected as The Sound I Saw (1983) and constitute the principal photographic record of post-war American jazz.

He opened A Photographer's Gallery on East 84th Street in 1955 — the first New York gallery devoted exclusively to photography. He served as a contract photographer for Sports Illustrated from 1968 to 1975. He chaired the Department of Art at Hunter College from 1975 and taught there for the next thirty years.

He received the National Medal of Arts in 2006. He died in Brooklyn on the twenty-seventh of October 2009, age eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the photographer whose darkroom and lens gave Harlem and post-war jazz their definitive image.