Light Break
by Roy DeCarava.
Zwirner Gallery, 2019,
$65.00 cloth.
the sound I saw
by Roy DeCarava.
Zwirner Gallery, 2019,
$75.00 cloth.
There were two things Roy DeCarava, a son of Harlem who made a lifelong, loving study of deep dark and its attendant grays, regretted never having photographed. One was Charlie Parker. And after Bird? The wind. “I’ve seen the wind at work, so to speak,” he told an interviewer once, with a bright-eyed chuckle and—as was soon clear—entire earnestness, the following emphasis his: “I don’t want to photograph what it makes move.”
DeCarava was after the thing itself, whether beholding Coltrane in a hurry of notes or the man making his slow, sure progress up some subway steps, each one an utterly singular individual and still an exemplary presence, each one an occasion for DeCarava’s radiantly complete attention. The pictures we encounter in Light Break and the sound I saw, two volumes published by the Zwirner Gallery in 2019 to mark the late photographer’s centennial, arrive at a crystalline sense of repose, ordinary life seen by way of an extraordinary inwardness—the photographer’s opening out on that of his subjects. Gracing the beginning of Light Break is a picture of Edna Smith at the bass, as commanding in her concentration and as enigmatic in her nearness to us as anything in Vermeer.
DeCarava first took to drawing; he wanted to be a painter. Sensing the young Roy’s talent early on, a schoolteacher showed up at the home of his mother, a Jamaican immigrant with her own predilection for photography, to say that her son had a gift. “I can hardly see that happening nowadays,” DeCarava, who died in 2009, would muse later about this decisive kindness. Around him was the great creative flowering of the Harlem Renaissance and, no less palpably, the daily reality of a racially segregated America; only after a teacher’s committed lobbying were DeCarava and one other Black student allowed to transfer to the main campus of Textile High School in Manhattan, an arts-imbued vocational school, to pursue their studies, having initially been limited to a separate campus in Harlem.
Not that others’ prejudices could ever persuade DeCarava that his neighborhood was anything less than a world, its apartments and sidewalks and jazz clubs standing out from the first as stages rich with dramatic occasion, furnishing truth upon human truth. Excepting the occasional commission, he stayed close to home for the duration of his long career, but there is nothing provincial about the world he patiently rendered in images. Applying for a Guggenheim Fellow-ship, of which he became the first Black recipient in 1952, DeCarava gave voice to a Joycean ambition:
I want to photograph Harlem through the Negro people. Morning, noon, night, at work, going to work, coming home from work, at play, in the streets, talking, kidding, laughing, in the home, in the playgrounds, in the schools, bars, stores, libraries, beauty parlors, churches, etc… I want to show the strength, the wisdom, the dignity of the Negro people. Not the famous and the well known, but the unknown and the unnamed, thus revealing the roots from which spring the greatness of all human beings.
DeCarava’s language asks us to envision those “roots” that are common to “all human beings,” to recognize Black life as continuous with all life; at the same time, he makes clear the political contours as well as the personal urgency of his vision, saying that he aims for “the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret,” with the goal of fostering a deeper “awareness of our heritage.”
What is crucial for DeCarava is that this commitment does not translate into art as “a documentary or sociological statement” but rather “a creative expression” whose particularity and pathos remain irreducible to anything else. DeCarava’s picture of a hallway in a Harlem apartment building, one of his own best-loved photographs—spare, opaque, and yielding great depths—captures this dynamic well. We note just how narrow the space is, how scant the light given off by a bulb at the end of the hall, which ends—it is not clear on first glance—in a darkened mirror? a further passageway? a door? “It’s about a hallway that I know I must have experienced as a child,” DeCarava said of the picture: “It was all the hallways that I grew up in…poor, poor tenements, badly lit, narrow and confining; hallways that had something to do with the economics of building for poor people.” Yet an equal part of what makes the image “personal, autobiographical,” in his telling, is that we are there with the older DeCarava, “looking at the same hallway and finding it beautiful.”
Beautiful because so much of the past is there in the pooling darkness, beautiful because he knows how much life goes on within those walls. 117th Street, New York, 1951 adopts a wide-angle view to take in a building that might contain many such hallways, and if the five stories we see dwarf the human figures below, these residents and passersby nonetheless call us away from reading the pair of boarded-up windows, the unprettified lot out front, the graffiti that reads PUS or maybe a word beginning that way, as a vision of straitened circumstances—for in balance we have the terrific purpose of a woman striding along in heels a little left of center, the easy languor of a child at the center of the street, the intimate gatherings on stoops or sidewalks, each pose and gesture hinting, even from a distance, at some irreducible individuality, everywhere the impress of community.
In DeCarava’s radically democratic vision, a woman looking down a stairwell in a wistful moment summons all the brooding force of a jazz musician mid-performance; thus does Shirley looking down stairwell, 1952, quasi-anonymous as she is, find a resonant echo in DeCarava’s portrait of Roy Haynes, say, or Quincy Jones. Billie Holiday, meanwhile, looks back at us with a wonderful intimacy, like someone we are coming to know for the first time, or just on the brink of knowing—a quiet hurt in her half smile, entirely self-possessed though she is. And so much of the life we see well offstage has an unlikely music to it; even the “three men walking” in a picture of that title seem swept up in a rhythm you can glimpse, though they’re in suits and the one in the middle carries a cane.
In DeCarava’s great jazz photographs, which sometimes have the warmly accessible feel of family portraits and sometimes of visionary instants, the dance is between an inspired solitude and an equally grounding sense of togetherness, two kinds of searching. As a type of the first, here is Donald Byrd looking out over a lake and trumpeting some unheard melody, nothing but hills behind him and rock formations before him, the photographer—at a good distance—the only other human presence in evidence. And then, capturing the second way, here are Billie Holiday and Hazel Scott at a house party, Billie seeming to sing something effortlessly, cigarette in hand. Scott looks over from the piano, used to this but a touch disbelieving; it must be we are in the presence of beauty.
So too with DeCarava’s recurrent efforts to capture Coltrane at his essence—a bit like photographing the longed-for wind. You’d be forgiven for taking Coltrane and Elvin, 1960 as a solo portrait before seeing its title; the drummer Elvin Jones, out of focus, recedes into a speculative presence for the presiding consciousness that is Coltrane, his features undefined; and as much as the latter is foregrounded, it is hard to tease out his own expression. He seems almost impassive. The beauty of DeCarava’s picture lies in the way it brings out a depth of concentration, the sense of a searching that transcends any easily articulable emotion. It’s a lonely thing—and, made visible, deeply affecting. Coltrane #24, 1961, whose title makes a point of implying how many efforts at seeing surround it, comes at the same soul very differently, rendering him a bit blurry. It’s as if we’ve traded the long low note for the ecstatic riff, yet another quantity that can’t be settled neatly into an image, only hinted at by a form that knows itself to be fragmentary, but which, with that artful blur, makes itself almost multiple—capable, in its way, of capturing the uncapturable.
DeCarava used a similar technique in a picture that comes toward the end of Light Break. At the center of Six figures in sunlight, 1985 are three girls marked out by their bright dresses. Bounding away from us, they seem to levitate a little, incorporeal. Looking at the picture in the context of DeCarava’s work as a whole, it is hard not to think of a very different image with which this one forms a haunting rhyme, what with its heightened sense of reality—it is like a flickering counterfactual yearning its way into being, a dream-vision of a different past. Five men, 1964 was DeCarava’s effort to bear witness, at a remove, to the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four Black girls died. He took the picture after a memorial service in Harlem. “The men were coming out of the church with faces so serious and so intense,” DeCarava remembered, “and the image was made”—that last turn so memorably effacing any sense of human artifice. The image has, yes, all the gravity and authority of revelation, bringing a monumental sorrow and dignity into focus and letting us see these things intimately. Of the five men, the faces of only two can be seen fully. The foremost figure is caught in contemplation, his face creased with concern; right behind him, another mourner looks out very fixedly, his forehead glistening with sweat. Beneath his glasses, you notice something else: his eyes are misting with tears. A well of feeling, then, inflects his expression of stoic determination. He could stand beside another DeCarava subject staring out as piercingly, the title figure of Mississippi freedom marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963. As Peter Galassi records in his invaluable survey of the photographer’s work, DeCarava called the subject of this portrait “the beauty of human promise.” At a moment when he pays witness to the struggle of Black Americans for civil rights, his characteristically spare picture asks us to look expansively at the woman before us. Already, you feel, she is outstaring history.
DeCarava’s vision of human transcendence was hard-won. He moved from painting to photography (which he first undertook as a means to an end, taking preparatory photos for drawings and silk-screen prints) because the latter seemed to offer a fuller contact with the world, the entrancing freedom of “taking what is and making it yours.” But for all his work as a community builder and union organizer, for all the esteem he won from friends and eminences—collaborating with Langston Hughes on a breakthrough book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, opening a noted photography gallery in Manhattan, finding his work championed by Edward Steichen at MoMA early on, and, decades later, treated to a major retrospective at that museum—DeCarava remained something of an outsider, possessed by the relentless singularity of his vision. He kept the sprawling maquette that comprises the sound I saw in an old suitcase for decades, unable to find a publisher. Chris Killip, who pointed me to DeCarava’s work several years ago, noted at the time how “very under-appreciated” the photographer has remained. The art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava has worked steadfastly to keep the legacy of her late husband alive, curating the exhibits at the Zwirner Gallery that accompanied Light Break and the sound I saw in 2019 and contributing a moving essay-in-appreciation to the former. Its title is simply “Celebration.”
It’s a word that captures much of the spirit of DeCarava’s work. What saw him through was a quality he thought of as essential to any great photographer: “desire,” as he said in a word, “the loving of seeing.” That loving was hard going. Drafted into the army in 1942 and stationed in Jim Crow Louisiana, DeCarava had a breakdown in the face of the racism he saw there, doubly cast down by the whole enterprise of being trained to kill. He was sent to a psychiatric ward before being discharged—the only place, he remembered, where Blacks and whites were together. When he got out, he said, “I just looked at the ground, and I looked at the sky, and I said, Hallelujah.”
I keep coming back to DeCarava’s visions of hands, images suffused by a sense of human love in touch with the divine, by the abounding impulse to hold up, protect, commune, bless, praise. In Bill and son, 1962, two hands lift up an infant, wonderful in the solidity and tenderness of their gesture, their sureness and grace; you don’t need to see the faces of father and son to feel these things. Or, in a picture of Jimmy Scott, you see the singer’s hands clasped and raised as he leans back to reach for a note, his face lost in a rush of light—yet another of DeCarava’s hallelujahs.
Tomas Unger’s poems and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. He lives in Boston.
