WSJM-9-2019

66 WSJ. MAGAZINE

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ROY DECARAVA,

WOMAN AND CHILDREN AT INTERSECTION

, 1952 © 2019

THE ESTATE OF ROY DECARAVA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED; F. MARTIN RAMIN (RECORDS); ROY DECARAVA, SHERRY SINGING

, 1983 © 2019 THE ESTATE OF ROY DECARAVA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WHAT’S NEWS

An interview with the widow of Roy

DeCarava, whose sublime photographs

go on view at David Zwirner this fall.

DEPTH OF FIELD

ART TALK

CANDID CAMERA

Clockwise from top: Roy DeCarava’s

1952 photograph Woman and Children at

Intersection, on view at David Zwirner’s

19th Street gallery in New York; the

album covers for Big Bill Broonzy’s

1958 Big Bill’s Blues and Miles Davis’s

1959 Porgy and Bess, which feature

DeCarava’s photography; Sherry

Singing, a 1983 portrait he took of his

wife, Sherry Turner DeCarava.

The photographer Roy DeCarava (1919–2009) was known for

his quietly moving black-and-white photographs of every-

day life in Harlem. His affi nity for music and musicians came

through in his art; during his career he photographed jazz

musicians such as Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and Duke

Ellington, and his work appeared on covers for albums like

Miles Davis’s Porgy and Bess and Mahalia Jackson’s Bless

This House. This fall, the artist’s work is on view at two of

David Zwirner’s New York City galleries in what is the most

comprehensive survey of his work since MoMA’s 1996 ret-

rospective. WSJ. spoke with art historian Sherry Turner

DeCarava, the artist’s widow, whose writing appears in the

books Zwirner is publishing to accompany each exhibition.

I

N THE LATE ’60S I was working at the Brooklyn Museum,

which was then this sleepy giant. I lectured on non-

Western art. One day, I was at a friend’s apartment, and

he asked whether I knew of Roy DeCarava. He wanted

to introduce us. So Roy and I met, but I had actually already

sent a letter inviting him to speak for a series at the museum

about contemporary African-American artists. And it turned

out that Roy had seen me on public access television, inter-

viewing people and showing African art, and reached out to

an artist friend of his and said, “Why don’t you introduce me

to nice people like this?” His friend had suggested I invite Roy

to the museum, but of course he was already on my list. So it

was always a little hard for me and Roy to determine who had

contacted who fi rst.

People carry their character on their face, and Roy was

cool, quiet, observant and thoughtful. Everything you’d

want a nice guy to be. He had very special qualities. And you

couldn’t actually put your fi nger on exactly what it was about

him, but he was diff erent. Many years later, he’d say, “Look

at me and see my work. Look at my work and see me.” He had

this incredible union with photography. It allowed his eye, his

spirit and his intellectual capacity to come through. He had

been involved with art since childhood. By the time he was 5

he knew he wanted to be an artist, and the tough guys on his

block in Harlem also recognized him as an artist. That status

protected him.

In high school, he took an art his-

tory class with a young teacher, and

it blew his mind. He started painting

seriously. It gave him time to develop

that hand-eye coordination, which

infl uenced his photography, his sensi-

tivity to forms, shapes, structure and

the image. He didn’t attend the École

des Beaux-Arts—it was more like the

street version. So when he switched

to photography in the 1940s, he had

this incredible foundation.

He began freelancing and worked for a number of com-

mercial magazines, including Sports Illustrated. People are

surprised to hear that, but it was a steady job. What troubled

Roy most was the lack of support from fellow photographers.

He took his work to [the prestigious photo agency] Magnum,

but they weren’t interested. One rewarding relationship he

did have was with [photographer and MoMA curator] Edward

Steichen, who saw this raw, unbelievable talent. I think he

was operational in securing the Guggenheim Fellowship [for

Roy], which allowed Roy to photograph for an entire year

without interruption. But I can’t say that anyone ever fully

accepted Roy and his work.

Roy was fascinated by photographing couples. He felt that

there was a magnetism between men and women that went

unaddressed by photographers who were more interested in

superfi cial aspects of relationships rather than the things

people expressed in gestures, words and through interac-

tion. He photographed the invisible. I was interested in music

and had been taking piano lessons. I wasn’t a prodigy or any-

thing. I don’t remember him taking the picture for Sherry

Singing. All I remember is seeing it as a fi nished image and

him titling it. I didn’t even realize

I was singing. I thought I was just

practicing [piano]. We often think

of artists and artwork as express-

ing the deepest emotions of the

artist, but Roy’s work expresses the

deepest emotions of the subject and

the artist. It’s kind of the ultimate

couple. That’s part of his work, the

kind of mystery of fi nding the sub-

ject and fi nding the thing that can’t

be expressed openly. —As told to

Thomas Gebremedhin