Roy DeCarava

The nearly two hundred superb plates in this book survey a half-century of work by a great American photographer. First applauded for The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a book on life in Harlem with text by Langston Hughes, Roy DeCarava is also known for his extraordinary photographs of jazz musicians - Billie Holiday, Milt Jackson, John Coltrane, and many others. A master of poetic contemplation and of sensual tonalities in black and white, DeCarava is, above all, a photographer of people. In his pictures of couples and children, of men at work and protesters on the march, he presents a compelling unity of private feeling and social conviction. Born in 1919, DeCarava was trained as a painter and printmaker. He turned to photography in the late 1940s and in 1952 won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first awarded to an African-American photographer. His early photographs of life in Harlem, at once tender and unsentimental, announced a powerful new talent. In 1956 he embarked on an extended series of jazz pictures, which in 1983 was exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem as The Sound I Saw. In the early 1960s, photographs of workers in New York's garment district and of civil-rights pr