THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 67
color black had been used in much of
American photography before DeCa-
rava came along.
T
he two tremendous shows of De-
Carava’s black-and-white work
currently on view at the David Zwirner
Gallery—“Light Break,” at the space
on West Nineteenth Street, and “the
sound i saw,” on East Sixty-ninth—are
the first large-scale exhibitions of his
photographs to be mounted in New
York since a 1996 retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art, and the tim-
ing couldn’t be more ideal. It’s wonder-
ful, during this age of agitprop and ques-
tions about who gets to speak for whom,
to be reminded of the delicacy that one
can find in art, a fineness of sensibility
that eludes a blatantly political reading.
Not that DeCarava will escape those
readings entirely; the majority of his
subjects are black, which means that
much of the response to his images will
be, de facto, sociological, addressing the
so-called marginalization of the people
depicted. But there is no such thing as
the marginal in DeCarava’s photographs.
Women, musicians, vegetation, Har-
lem: all of it is alive with the experience
of being.
I’m not sure if the immediacy of pho-
tography—the ability to record one’s
impressions of the world relatively
quickly—contributed to DeCarava’s love
of the medium, but as a young black
man he knew something about how
ephemeral life could be, and about the
forces around him that didn’t want him
to exist at all. Drafted into the Army in
1942, he was first sent to Virginia, and
then stationed in Fort Claiborne, Lou-
isiana, in the Jim Crow South. There,
DeCarava experienced a racism so in-
tense that he broke down. In Peter Ga-
lassi’s biographical essay for the MOMA
show, the artist recalled:
The only place that wasn’t segregated in the
army was the psychiatric ward of the hospital.
I was there for about a month. I was in the
army for about six or seven months altogether,
but I had nightmares about it for twenty years.
The brilliant Lester Young played
his saxophone on a slant in order to
achieve the sound he wanted, and one
gets the sense, while walking through
“Light Break,” which includes a hun-
dred and nineteen silver-gelatin prints
and spans more than half a century of
picture-making (though the images are
not hung in chronological order), that
DeCarava photographed on a kind of
emotional slant. His phenomenal 1952
portrait of a girlish, hip, centered Billie
Holiday is unusual in that she is facing
the camera, relating to DeCarava with
what looks like a mixture of curiosity,
flirtatiousness, and defiance: “This is
me,” she seems to say. “Here I am, and
who are you?” That kind of exchange is
rare. A number of the well-known black
people whose images appear in “Light
Break” and “the sound i saw” grew up
or had family in the South at a time
when being black and being looked at
was, to put it mildly, a complicated prop-
osition. It was no doubt frightening for
some of DeCarava’s subjects to feel seen
in this way, and the shy, big, and deli-
cate John Coltrane, who doesn’t look
toward the camera at all, is a prime ex-
ample of the difficulty of trying to dis-
tinguish between being viewed and being
perceived as a target.
In another photograph from 1952, the
legendary pianist and composer Mary
Lou Williams sits off center in DeCar-
ava’s carefully considered framing. (Like
many of his contemporaries, DeCarava
had great respect for Henri Cartier-Bres-
son’s ability to frame the “decisive mo-
ment” with dexterity and formal intel-
ligence.) Williams, her head turned,
seems to be listening to something that’s
being said or is about to be said beyond
the frame; she’s waiting to respond, and
DeCarava is waiting with her. While
the picture is a photograph of Williams,
it is also a study of the weight of black-
ness: the blackness of the hair that tops
her slightly less dark face and the black
liquid intelligence of her eyes, offset by
the whiteness of her blouse.
DeCarava was always exploring ways
to do photographically what he could
do as a draftsman: make precise shapes
on a white page. As he grew older, he
looked for purer and purer shapes, un-
encumbered by the drama of the indi-
vidual. (In “Couples, Lake,” from 2001,
for instance, mountains stand solidly on
the far side of a lake. Closer to the viewer,
on this side of the water, sits a row of
couples whose forms echo those of the
mountains.) Sometimes the precision
can make the pictures feel too much
like “fine art” and less troubling and freethan they could be, but it’s never unin-
teresting to see what DeCarava saw.
The shows were curated by the art-
ist’s widow, the art historian Sherry
Turner DeCarava, and she has done a
great job of distilling the work without
memorializing her husband, so that what
emerges is as much the narrative of a
thinker as that of an artist. Whereas
some photographers, such as Weegee
and Garry Winogrand, seem to react
quickly, with great verve and energy, and
only after the fact question what they’ve
done, DeCarava—especially in the thirty
silver-gelatin photographs about musi-
cians and black music that make up “the
sound i saw”—thought about thinking,
and then improvised around those
thoughts. The pictures that grab your
heart in “the sound i saw” are the ones
that study the subjects’ relationship to
their art. No one has ever captured Lena
Horne’s pride in her work and her race
better than DeCarava did in his 1957
portrait “Count Basie and Lena Horne.”
Horne is visibly in love with all that
Basie makes her feel as a musician and
as a black woman. As in the Williams
portrait, whiteness—here the whiteness
of Horne’s turban, which sits like a bea-
con at the top of the image—is used to
underline the blackness in the photo-
graph, black skin and black as a color
that leads to black feeling and thought.
In 1950, DeCarava befriended a young
photographer named Homer Page, who
was a protégé of Edward Steichen. (Stei-
chen included several of DeCarava’s
photographs in his landmark 1955 ex-
hibition, “The Family of Man.”) It was
Page who helped DeCarava develop his
unique printing style. Until then, Ga-
lassi writes, DeCarava had been “print-
ing the negative to yield a convention-
ally full range of contrast, from brilliant
white to dense black, thus rendering the
picture brittle and harsh. After talking
with Page, he taught himself how to
make the image cohere by printing it
more softly, in a narrower range of deep
tones, thus breathing space and life into
a luxury of dark grays.” Gray is, of course,
a color between black and white, and
it’s everywhere in DeCarava’s pictures,
like a veil between you and the situa-
tion being presented, more evidence of
DeCarava’s gentility and watchfulness,
his commitment to finding the light in
what others might consider darkness. ♦