- Artist
- Roy DeCarava 1919–2009
- Medium
- Photo-etching on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 289 × 192 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Tate Members 2019
- Reference
- P82485
Summary
This work is from Twelve Photogravures 1950–79 (Tate P82474 – 85), a portfolio printed in 1991 comprising twelve handmade photogravure prints created by the African American photographer Roy DeCarava based on his photographs shot between 1950 and 1979. The twelve images included in the portfolio are: Horace Silver, New York 1963, Dancers, New York 1956, Paul Roberson, New York 1950, Couple Dancing, New York 1956, Across the Street, Night, Brooklyn 1978, Milt Jackson, New York 1956, Fourth of July, Prospect Park, Brooklyn 1978, Night Feeding, Brooklyn 1973, Lingerie, New York 1950, Four Men, New York 1956, Man in Window, Brooklyn 1978 and Billie at Braddock’s New York 1952.
The prints portray African American musicians such as Horace Silver, Paul Roberson, Milt Jackson and Billie Holiday during and after their performances, as well as ordinary citizens – individuals or groups – in private and public settings in New York City’s African American neighbourhoods. Like DeCarava’s photographs, the photogravures are distinctive for their varied and dark tonalities and the way in which they reveal their subjects in shades of white to grey and black in a beautiful and dignified manner.
The portfolio was published by Renaissance Press in Ashuelot, New Hampshire in 1991 under DeCarava’s supervision. The photogravures were made over two years by DeCarava in collaboration with Paul Taylor, an expert in the photogravure technique and the director of Renaissance Press, based on DeCarava’s most iconic photographic images created from 1950 to 1979. The prints were made by Clary Healy. Fifty numbered editions were created plus one bon á tirer, one printer’s proof, six artist’s proofs and three hors commerce. Each set is numbered and stored in a black clamshell case with a gilt-lettered leather title label. Tate’s copy is number forty in the edition. Each photogravure print is signed, dated and inscribed ‘40/50’ in pencil in the margin. Paul Taylor commented on his close collaboration with DeCarava during the process of making the prints:
The photogravure process often surprised him and gave him new ideas as to how the print should look … I remade many of the plates numerous times to satisfy qualities that Roy knew were possible through both the platemaking and printing process … Subtle shades of cold and warm inks were selectively applied to the plates to increase dimensionality and local contrast. Variations of ink viscosities were also applied throughout many of the plates to achieve similar results.
(Paul Taylor, ‘From the Archives: Roy DeCarava “Twelve Photogravures”, https://www.renaissancepress.com/from-the-archives-roy-decarava-twelve-photogravures-mark-morrisroe/, accessed 29 April 2019.)
Initially trained as a painter, DeCarava took up photography while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work for the posters division of the Work Projects Administration of the United States Government. Having come of age towards the end of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, from the 1940s onwards DeCarava pursued creative expressions by photographing the everyday life of black Americans in private and public settings in various urban neighbourhoods in New York City, most notably Harlem and Brooklyn. He also photographed musicians, athletes, and leaders and activists of the civil rights movement. He took assignments from various magazines, including Life and Newsweek. In addition, he taught at college, organized a workshop fostering the talents of numerous young black photographers known as the Kamoinge Workshop, and showed other American photographers at the gallery he established, A Photographer’s Gallery. Through these activities, he came to be regarded as the founder of a group of photographers who focused on artistically portraying African Americans, moving away from the social documentary traditions of his time. His photographs, characterised by their varied dark tonality and beauty, speak eloquently as a record of black life in America without the dramatically humanist tone and objectives of other photographers like Edward Steichen and W. Eugene Smith. The curator Peter Galassi, who organised the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1996, said of DeCarava’s work: ‘He was looking at everyday life in Harlem from the inside, not as a sociological or political vehicle. No photographer black or white before him had really shown ordinary domestic life so perceptively and tenderly, so persuasively.’ (Quoted in Randy Kennedy, ‘Roy DeCarava, Harlem Insider Who Photographed Ordinary Life Dies at 89’, New York Times, 28 October 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/arts/29decarava.html, accessed 29 April 2019.)
DeCarava won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, becoming the first Black photographer to do so. In his application he stated that photography was ‘a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret’ (quoted in Kennedy 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/arts/29decarava.html, accessed 29 April 2019). This intention is evident in the twelve images that make up Twelve Photogravures.
Further reading
Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, New York 1955.
Peter Galassi (ed.), Roy DeCarava, A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1996.
Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley (eds.), Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London 2017.
Yasufumi Nakamori
April 2019
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