Roy DeCarava (1919-2009): A Farewell

Portrait of Roy DeCarava by Sherry Turner DeCarava, 1996

Photographer, writer, and teacher Roy DeCarava passed away on October 27, 2009.

I got to know Roy at the time of his 1969 mid-career retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem. I reviewed that show for the Village Voice. Prior to that first encounter I’d savaged (also in the Village Voice) the “Harlem On My Mind” extravaganza staged by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1968. Roy himself refused to participate in that fiasco, a stance I respected and admired.

The combination of that act of defiance (among others), his Studio Museum show (which he refused to call a retrospective — “I’m not nearly finished,” he told me, and the next four decades proved him right), and his first great book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, made Roy one of those points of light by which I steer my own life.

Soon after that first meeting in his garment-district loft I wrote a profile of him for Popular Photography, and subsequently discussed his work in a number of articles, plus a lengthy interview with him published in 1996 by Photo Metro magazine in San Francisco. Recognition came to Roy comparatively late, but it did come. By the end of his life he’d traveled the world, exhibited internationally, published numerous books, and received many honors — including the National Medal of Honor, at the White House, delivered by, of all people, George W. Bush (who I’m sure got an earful from Roy if they had a private moment on that occasion; Roy did not mince words, or suffer fools gladly).

Here’s a link to his New York Times obituary. Here’s another, written by C. W. Rogers. And here’s a link to a wonderful NPR piece on him — including lovely commentary by Roy himself — from 1996. There’s also a shorter, posthumous NPR piece on YouTube:

On January 28, 2010, a memorial service honoring Roy DeCarava took place at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This followed a much smaller, private ceremony on November 2, 2009 at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in Manhattan. At the family’s invitation I attended both, and on last Thursday night delivered the following prepared remarks.

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I’m deeply honored to take part in tonight’s tribute. I presented an earlier version of these remarks at a National Arts Club event in 2001, with Roy present to receive a lifetime achievement award. I couldn’t find a way to improve on them, so I repeat them on this more solemn occasion, which I think of as a celebration nonetheless.

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In the winter of 1969, and in what now seems to him another life entirely, a small, skinny white man who’d just turned 26 but looked much younger climbed the stairs of a loft building on Sixth Avenue in this city’s garment district, to visit the studio of a 50-year-old black photographer he’d never met, for the purpose of writing a profile of him. He’d wangled this assignment from the bemused editors of a camera magazine with a readership composed primarily of amateur hobbyists, the only publication he’d been able to interest in the idea. These editors — all of them white — hadn’t seemed especially excited by the proposal, and indeed had appeared somehow assured that it would never amount to anything; his subject, they’d told him, was notoriously difficult, and didn’t much care for people of the melanin-deficient persuasion, was in fact a racist. But they let him try, and promised to publish anything worthwhile that resulted.

The young man could certainly understand why, in those years (not to mention some centuries preceding them), anyone black could mistrust and even dislike anyone white, either on principle or, practically speaking, as a matter of reasonable precaution and basic common sense. However, he doubted the last part of the warning, about racism. He’d fallen in love with the photographer’s one published volume of images, a small paperback that, in its original edition, he still considers one of the classic and most perfect photography books ever published. And he’d recently seen, and then revisited, and then reviewed (for a different publication) a massive mid-career survey of the photographer’s work, a sustained epic-scale statement without a single false note, presented at a different incarnation of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the institution hosting this gathering tonight. Attention to the nuances of individual human beings radiated from that exhibition, along with a great love of the world — the vision of someone large-hearted who worked hard to see things as they were. The photographer had agreed to see him. He hoped he could stand up to the older man’s scrutiny; he wanted very much to be a credit to his race.

Of course, at that age he could hardly see himself clearly. With shoulder-length hair, quite possibly wearing something eccentric even for that weird fashion period, how did he look to the older man who opened the door to him a few moments later? Probably not at all like anyone in a position to do him any kind of good. Perhaps his saving grace was that he seemed harmless enough, and at least — aside from skin color — did not resemble those whom the photographer had battled for such a long time.

In any case, the younger man was invited in to the orderly, clean loft space, treated courteously, offered coffee, and had his many questions patiently answered. The older man proved somewhat wary, chose his words carefully, but articulated his ideas and related his experiences and discussed his beliefs clearly and frankly. His situation was not promising. He had no career to speak of; he couldn’t find a publisher for his book projects; he was scrambling for work; he’d recently gone through a difficult divorce. There was anxiety, disillusionment, and even bitterness in him, but no discernible cynicism or hatred. He had something of the manner of a middleweight halfway through a major bout he knew he could lose. But he never bemoaned his lot, or tooted his own horn; he simply spoke of what he’d done, and why, and what he thought his actions and decisions meant. He knew who he was, and what he was worth.

Then the younger man was shown work — first a maquette for a marvelous book about jazz, then box after box of monochrome prints, glowing and glinting and burnished like black pearls, the triumphs of a master silversmith, brimming with exultant life, great sorrow and deep joy, fierce anger and vast tenderness, and pulsing beneath it that profound embrace of the world. Some of the work he knew already, from the book and the show, but there was much he’d never seen, quite a bit that apparently hardly anyone had ever laid eyes on.

He left almost drunk with pleasure, feeling like the first archaeologist who’d peered into the tomb of King Tutankhamen and, when asked what he saw there, said, breathlessly, “Wonderful things!” And the fact that this bounty was not before its potential audiences simply seemed to him so wrong that he understood he had some obligation to correct it. There were other injustices that needed amending, done to the man and to the artist, but that this work’s potential to make the world a richer place for all to inhabit had not been realized seemed the greatest loss of all.

So the younger man went home and wrote about what he’d seen and heard and thought and felt in relation to the older man and his photographs. And, a few months later — just about exactly forty years ago, in April of 1970 — what he put down on paper appeared in print in the pages of a magazine called, of all things, Popular Photography.

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That young white guy was me, as you’ve no doubt realized, and the photographer of course was Roy DeCarava. And we both watched with some amazement what happened after that piece appeared. To be precise: Nothing. There are people who generously attribute a great deal to that essay, some who even draw a direct line from it to notable later events in Roy’s career. It’s surely gratifying on a certain level to know that people would think that, but I want to remind you that it would take another full decade for Roy to find a publisher for his next book, and a quarter of a century for the superb Museum of Modern Art retrospective exhibit and monograph — and that the jazz book as Roy envisioned it, The Sound I Saw, did not appear in print until the fall of 2001. So much for what some folks like to refer to in awed tones as “the power of the critic.”

Of course, Popular Photography isn’t Art in America or Esquire or the New York Times Sunday Magazine. And, truth be told, Clement Greenberg I’m not — regrettably, in this case. Demonstrably, as in the present instance, I lack the clout to make an artist’s career, overnight or over the long haul. So I can’t accept any particular credit for what belatedly came to pass — especially because I’m convinced it would have happened anyway. Roy’s is inarguably one of the major bodies of work of twentieth-century photography, and a significant contribution to the larger field of twentieth-century art. Unless it got accidentally destroyed or carelessly looted, some other archaeologist with eyes in his head and even half a brain would have peered into that treasure trove eventually and turned around to whisper delightedly to the world, “Wonderful things!”

Roy’s work itself — and what I might call the situation of that work in the field of photography when I came to it in the late 1960s — presented me with some important challenges as a writer about photography, and a chance to define in public some fundamental principles of my own project as a critic and historian. Few people understand what such an opportunity means to a critic, and how rarely it comes along. So I’m being realistic, not modest, when I say the article meant a lot to me, and to Roy, and to the small group of people who knew and loved him and admired his work at the time, but didn’t mean much to anyone else.

In the event, nobody tied up Roy’s phone lines or crowded around his studio’s front door in the days and weeks and months and even years immediately following the publication of that profile. Nonetheless, he persevered, because he truly did not know how to do otherwise. And, eventually, he overcame. I was simply happy for Roy that he, and his terrific family, and those others who knew and loved him and learned from him and drew strength from his work and his example, got to hear those whispers and gasps and exclamations of delight for more than a few years while we had him with us, and that he received directly and absorbed and drew nourishment and solace from some of the praise and gratitude to which he was entitled for tending the fires during some dark and lonely hours in order to keep producing this work while waiting for us to become worthy of it and open to it.

I find it particularly satisfying that this level of validation and recognition and support began to trickle in when he was at the height of his powers, where he remained to the last — because it nourished what became one of the longest continuously productive careers in contemporary photography, a steady evolution that gave the lie to the facile notion that photographers have only ten fertile years. It was especially gratifying to see someone get what he deserved when he was still able to put it to good use.

Yet it seems to me that, when all is said and done, Roy and his work came that far because, even when he despaired, Roy never quit on himself or on his work — and because, with their own inherent power and resonance, he and his art slowly but inexorably attracted to themselves people who understood their value and could lend their support and encouragement. Quite a few of them are here tonight, and I’m proud to be among this goodly crowd as just another face in it.

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Once in a blue moon, along with the new-age babble and the clichéd gleanings from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, I get a saying worth remembering in a Chinese fortune cookie — a thought that seems to have come straight and unmediated from someone’s heart. There’s one in particular that I cherish, because it proved accurate about the person I shared dinner with that night — and because, simple as it seems, I haven’t found many people who live up to it, so it serves me as a means to gauge the individuals who come into my life. That slip of paper said, “This person is serious, and true, and deserves to be respected.” That describes Roy himself, of course, as you know if you ever spoke with him at any length, or got to know him, or even if you never met him but just take time to contemplate how he conducted his life as a man, as a photographer, and as a citizen. But you’ll know it from standing in front of his pictures and searching them, too. “You should be able to look at me and see my work,” Roy told me in 1969. “You should be able to look at my work and see me.”

What it may take you some time to realize, as it did me, is that Roy DeCarava’s photographs look back at you in turn, search you, weigh you; they’re made for and always seeking that viewer who is “serious, true, and deserves to be respected.” It’s a mark of his achievement that, after all those hard years, his images never ceased to approach that inquiry optimistically, with abiding faith in the possibility that such viewers existed and would make their way to his work. Remarkably, more often than not, and much more often today than four decades ago, that’s exactly what happens. It’s enough to give you hope for the future.

Donations in Roy’s memory can be made to the Roy DeCarava Fund at the Jazz Foundation of America, 322 W. 48th St., New York, NY 10036, www.jazzfoundation.org.