Oct 17, 2019 - Sale 2520

Sale 2520 - Lot 258

Price Realized: $ 17,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
ROY DECARAVA (1919-2009)
Boy with bowed head. Silver print, the image measuring approximately 13x10 inches (33x25.4 cm.), the mount, with a laid down overmat, 20x16 inches (50.8x40.6 cm.), with DeCarava's hand stamp and his typed label with the title and inventory notations (a price crossed out), on mount verso. 1961; printed early 1970s
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

From the Witkin Gallery, New York, New York; to the Present Owner, in 1979.

Roy DeCarava first used his 35mm camera as a tool for printmaking and painting, but soon turned to the medium of photography as his primary outlet for artistic expression. His sensitive and richly rendered photographs of his community in Harlem convey a timeless sense of emotional intimacy and seductive reflection. Though at first glance DeCarava's photographs appear to be largely documentarian, his work in fact centers around a refined aesthetic impulse to create a visual record of a feeling, and a means of metaphorical creative expression.

DeCarava printed his own work (he understood the darkroom process to be an integral component of the creation of an image), and his prints are defined less by the strict black-and-white tonalities commonly associated with silver prints and more by a range of shadow tones, evocative in their subtle gradation and suggestive of a lyrical meditation on form, texture, and the senses.

This figure's bent head renders the image nearly abstract, and his folded arms suggestive of the solitary interior life of an unknowable stranger. The early 1960s was a transitional time for the artist, indicative of the social realities of the period, and the image seems to convey both a sense of loneliness and isolation. And yet DeCarava always insisted that his work remained about light, not darkness, even as the tones of his work employed a specialized palette dark grays and deep blacks.

Galassi, Roy DeCarava, A Retrospective (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), p. 177.