DE CARAVA ROY (1919 ) Portfolio entitled Roy De Carava

Sale 2146 - Lot 519

Price Realized: $ 52,800

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 50,000 - $ 75,000

DE CARAVA, ROY (1919- )
Portfolio entitled "Roy De Carava." With 12 stunning dust-grain photogravures, image size 7 1/2x11 inches (19.1x28 cm.), sheet size 18x22 inches (45.7x55.9 cm.), each is signed, dated, and numbered, "AP II/VI," by De Carava, in pencil, on recto. Elephant folio-size, gilt-lettered black clamshell box; contents loose as issued. 1991

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"Four Men, New York" (1956) "Billie [Holiday] at Braddocks, New York" (1952) "Paul Robeson, New York" (1950) "Lingerie, New York" (1950) "Horace Silver, New York" (1963) "Couple Dancing, New York" (1956) "Across the Street, Night, Brooklyn" (1978) "Night Feeding, Brooklyn" (1973) "Man in Window, Brooklyn" (1978) "Fourth of July, Prospect Park, Brooklyn" (1979) "Dancers, New York" (1956) "Milt Jackson, New York" (1956).

Reflecting on his long, established photographic career, Roy DeCarava's work is inextricably linked with Harlem. Initially a print-maker, he first acquired a hand-held camera in the 1940s and found an artistic vocabulary and sensibility that better suited his ambitions. DeCarava first exhibited his photographs in 1950, and soon after became the first African-American to be awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

His body of work is notable for its great range, encompassing both the lyrical images of jazz musicians and the gritty depictions of life in mid-century Harlem. An excerpt from DeCarava's Guggenheim proposal stated: "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 . . . I want a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret." This portfolio of DeCarava's photographs underscores his status as a masterful chronicler of the everyday life.

At the heart of DeCarava's photography is an aesthetic of patient contemplation. His work achieves this reflective state of grace in the way he views the world while inviting his viewers to look for themselves. Through its lyric concision DeCarava's work addresses the viewer with uncommon intimacy; its formal attributes are a vehicle of deeper feeling and message.

The emotional intimacy of DeCarava's photography is still more remarkable because of its rich social meaning. As such, the expression of self is nearly always an expression in relation to others. In the early 1960s, DeCarava's work began to respond to racial discrimination. He shot the laborers in New York's garment district and civil rights protests, Mississippi freedom marchers in Washington, D. C., and other important moments in American social change. His art has continued to evolve over time, always embarking on the most emotive way to document and critique the human condition.