Seen And Heard

Roy DeCarava’s poetics of blackness.

- Hilton ALS

In the summer of 1954, Roy DeCarava, a thirty­four­year­old photographer from Harlem, paid a visit to the fifty­two­year­old Langston Hughes. The two men didn’t know each other well, but it was not unusual for younger artists to seek out the famous author. In the more than two decades since Hughes—who was originally from Joplin, Missouri—had decided to make his home in Harlem, he had opened his doors to fledgling writers, painters, performers, and the like, who came looking for his genial counsel about their work and their lives. Enormously productive, Hughes was, at the time, one of very few artists of color who supported themselves with their art alone. So far, DeCarava hadn’t managed to do that himself. The only child of a hardworking single Jamaican mother, he had learned young that a strong work ethic was the key to advancement. By the time he met Hughes, he had toiled for several years as an illustrator for an advertising firm. A skilled draftsman, painter, and printmaker, he had developed his various talents first at the now defunct Textile High School, on West Eighteenth Street, and then at the Cooper Union School of Art, the Harlem Community Art Center, and, in the mid­forties, the George Washington Carver Art School. During the years of his apprenticeship as an artist, DeCarava’s practice underwent a great transformation: the photographs he had begun taking as the foundation for his prints became his dominant mode of expression.