Roy Decarava: A Retrospective [Hardcover]

Peter Galassi (Author), Sherry Turner Decarava (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1996

Featuring 200 superb plates spanning half a century, this book is the first retrospective of the work of Roy DeCarava, a great American photographer known for his brilliant photographs of Harlem and of jazz musicians such as Billie Holliday and John Coltrane. Published to accompany a major exhibition that opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in early 1996.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This survey of a half-century of photographer Roy DeCarava's (b. 1919) drawings, serigraphs, and photographs accompanies a traveling exhibition. DeCarava, the first African American to win a Guggenheim Fellowship (in 1952), illustrated Langston Hughes's The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), yet the only previous monograph on his work is out of print. Here, his wife, art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, provides a perceptive essay about his early life, his first drawings and serigraphs, and the emergence of his expressive, unsentimental, and sometimes abstract photographic style, which makes his work immediately recognizable. Galassi, chief curator of photography for the Museum of Modern Art, surveys DeCarava's career and influences and provides new information on one of the earliest photographic galleries in New York City, A Photographer's Gallery, opened by the DeCaravas in their home. The quality of the works reproduced here, which often focus on black life in New York City, is superb. Highly recommended for photography, black history, and music collections.?Kathleen Gail Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

That DeCarava was a painter and graphic artist before turning to photography does much to explain the strong lines, extraordinarily rich tonality, and dramatic exploitation of light in his photos. Their emotional charge, however, arises from the social choices DeCarava made for his career. He has expended nearly his entire professional effort upon New York City's black communities. He cherishes the people, places, and events in his pictures and developed early the means to express his affection. He shoots using only ambient light, then prints so as to coax light expressively out of very dark images or, less often, to delineate darker detail in very light ones. The grays in his black-and-white pictures are velvety and warm--qualities he occasionally enhances by purposely shooting out of focus or exposing long enough to show movement. Whether a picture's immediate subject is documentarily realistic or, as in a photo such as Crushed Can, an abstract form bodied forth in a concrete object, the work is charged with earthy mystery, like a prime Rembrandt painting or a late Michelangelo sculpture in which, because of the artist's rendering of light and mass, life seems to be springing off the canvas, out of the stone, like Adam from the earth on the day of his creation. Like one of his favorite portrait subjects, John Coltrane, DeCarava is one of the transcendently great American artists. Ray Olson

Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Museum of Modern Art; First Edition edition (March 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810961563
• ISBN-13: 978-0810961562
• Product Dimensions: 11.8 x 10.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,166,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MARVELOUS BOOK FULL OF UNFORGETTABLE IMAGERY, August 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Roy Decarava: A Retrospective (Hardcover)

Pauline Kael once wrote of a film, "I'm scared to say how good I think this movie is." That's how I feel about this book. The pictures cover a wide variety of subjects, from urban landscapes to intimate family scenes to nearly abstract images of the commonplace, but they are consistently engaging, thematically and artistically. All of the photographs are black-and-white, many are dark with multiple gradations of gray, and most are shot with ambient light. De Carava was a painter before he became a photographer, and that background shows in his appreciation for composition and the use of light. Anyone who doubts that photography can rise to the level of art should spend some time with these images.

There are so many great pictures in this book that it's hard to pick just a few favorites. But "Dancers, New York City," "Woman Walking, Above," "Sam Laughing," "Gittel" and "Graduation Day" would all be toward the top of my list. There are also a number of interesting shots of writers, artists and musicians who were part of African-American New York City arts scene in the 1950s and early 60s.

The prefatory essays are helpful and informative, but it's the photos themselves that are the stars of this show.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Collection of Outstanding Images, July 16, 1998

By 

Robert Derenthal "bucherwurm" (California United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Roy Decarava: A Retrospective (Hardcover)

Although I am a serious amateur photographer, and student of the history of photography, I admit to being ignorant of DeCarava's work. A visit to the current DeCarava exhibition at Atlanta's High Museum changed that. He is an outstanding black and white photographer, with a tendency to produce dark and moody scenes. The images work. Each one seems to clearly convey the artists intent. He shows mastery in all of his varied works whether street scenes, portraits, abstractions, or still lifes. I couldn't leave the museum without buying this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A magnificent book, September 22, 1998

By 

Frederique Delacoste (San Francisco, California USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Roy De Carava a Retrospective (Hardcover)

Roy de Carava's photographs are simply breathtaking.

It is really unfortunate that the book is no longer available in its softcover edition. Could we convince MOMA to make it accessible to people who can't pay sixty bucks for a book?