“Blackness is the ceaselessly miraculous demonstration that there is no black and white, just sun and shade.” - Fred Moten
Sun and Shade, 1952
“Roy DeCarava began his career as a painter and turned to photography in the mid-1940s to gather information for his canvases. By 1952, he had fully embraced the new medium and produced a body of work for which he was the ninth photographer to be awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. In 1955, he co-authored with the poet Langston Hughes The Sweet Flypaper of Life, an award-winning pictorial fiction about the lives of people in Harlem. The book was re-published in several editions, appearing in English, German, Chinese and Czechoslovakian; it was reissued in 1984 by Howard University Press.
Unlike many photographers of his day, Mr. DeCarava did not intend that his photos be viewed as visual documentation but rather as artistic expressions in their own right so that his images were, in his words, "serious," "artistic," and universally "human." Whether photographing the Scottish countryside or the heart of New York City, the deep connection he felt to the lives of people everywhere is evident in the integrity of his images. Among the many subjects his camera focused upon, he expressed an early desire to address the lack of artistic attention given to the lives of Black Americans, illuminating the aesthetic and human qualities of each individual life through the lens of his perceptions.”