66 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
“Jimmy Garrison,” c. 1961: DeCarava’s work is alive with the experience of being.
ACRITIC AT LARGE
SEEN AND HEARD
Roy DeCarava’s poetics of blackness.
BY HILTONALS
© 2019 ESTATE OF ROY DECARAVA. COURTESY DAVID ZWIRNER
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROY DEC A R AVA
I
n the summer of 1954, Roy DeCa
rava, a thirtyfouryearold photog
rapher from Harlem, paid a visit to the
fiftytwoyearold Langston Hughes.
The two men didn’t know each other
well, but it was not unusual for younger
artists to seek out the famous author.
In the more than two decades since
Hughes—who was originally from Jop
lin, Missouri—had decided to make his
home in Harlem, he had opened his
doors to fledgling writers, painters, per
formers, and the like, who came look
ing for his genial counsel about their
work and their lives. Enormously pro
ductive, Hughes was, at the time, one
of very few artists of color who sup
ported themselves with their art alone.
So far, DeCarava hadn’t managed to
do that himself. The only child of a
hardworking single Jamaican mother,
he had learned young that a strong
work ethic was the key to advancement.
By the time he met Hughes, he had
toiled for several years as an illustrator
for an advertising firm. A skilled drafts
man, painter, and printmaker, he had
developed his various talents first at the
now defunct Textile High School, on
West Eighteenth Street, and then at
the Cooper Union School of Art, the
Harlem Community Art Center, and,
in the midforties, the George Wash
ington Carver Art School. During the
years of his apprenticeship as an artist,
DeCarava’s practice underwent a great
transformation: the photographs he had
begun taking as the foundation for his
prints became his dominant mode of
expression.
Hughes’s enthusiasm for DeCarava’s
dark, emotive images was immediate.
After helping him secure a publish
ing contract with Simon & Schuster,
Hughes wrote a text to hang the pic
tures on: “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,”
a monologue spoken by Sister Mary
Bradley, an elderly black woman who
lives in and loves Harlem. Sister Mary
has been ill, but she isn’t yet ready to
meet her cherished Maker; she wants
to stick around, on the sweet flypaper
of life, to see what progress blacks will
make in this hostile world—to see, for
instance, “what this integration the Su
preme Court has done decreed is going
to be like.” The resulting book, also
titled “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,”
which contains a hundred and forty of
DeCarava’s photographs, is a fascinat
ing historical artifact but not the best
place to start if you’re interested in what
made DeCarava, who died in 2009, at
age eightynine, essential and inspir
ing to numerous imagemakers who
came after him, including the painter
Kerry James Marshall and the film
maker Kahlil Joseph. When I first saw
the book, in the late eighties, I didn’t
understand why DeCarava occupied a
nearmythic status among some of my
photographer friends. The book’s five
byseveninch format meant that the
pictures were small, and I found the
folksy tone of Hughes’s text distract
ing: it spilled over the photographs and
sentimentalized them. I felt as though
Hughes was trying to explain black
ness—and DeCarava’s photographs of
it—to white people.
Still, the book was a critical and com
mercial success, and it no doubt was
part of what allowed DeCarava to quit
his job and devote the rest of his life to
photography. By the time he died, his
body of work had come together to
form, among other things, a monumen
tal poetics of blackness, one that ex
plored the ways in which race can define
a person’s style and essence, and made
it clear how poorly or negligently the
