DECARAVA ROY (1919 ) Graduation

Sale 2166 - Lot 344

Unsold

Estimate: $ 9,000 - $ 12,000

DECARAVA, ROY (1919- )
"Graduation." Silver print, 9 1/2x13 1/2 inches (24.1x34.3 cm.), with DeCarava's signature, in ink, on recto. 1949; printed 1960s-early 1970s

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New York's Harlem serves as the dynamic center and artistic catalyst of Roy DeCarava's long photographic career. De Carava tenderly focused his lens on the African-American community, which he depicted in his exuberant street photographs and humanist portraits. He first exhibited his fine art photographs in 1950. Two years later, in 1952, he was the first African-American to be awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. An intensely fruitful period followed, highlighted by the 1955 photobook, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, with poet Langston Hughes.

The photograph offered here appears in the text of that book, in a story chronicling the life of a woman in Harlem. Hughes and DeCarava present the image much as we might still view it today. A young woman dressed in a beautiful frothy white dress is set in poetic relief against a gritty brick wall and empty city lots. The image is both forlorn and transcendent, a complex rendering of the post-war African-American experience. "But it's nice to see young folks all dressed up going somewhere--maybe to a party," Hughes wrote, and a few pages later, "Yet there is so much to see in Harlem!"

Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective, 137.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 65.