ROY DECARAVA (1919-2009) Hallway, New York. 1953. Silver print, the image measuring 13¼x9 inches (63.5x22.9 cm.), the sheet 14x11 inches (35.6x27.9 cm.), with DeCarava's signature in ink on recto, and his signature in pencil on verso.
Provenance Acquired directly from Roy DeCarava in 2005 by the Present Owner
Roy DeCarava's Hallway, New York was made as part of an extended series documenting daily life in Harlem during his yearlong Guggenheim Fellowship, the first ever awarded to an African American photographer. He told the San Francisco journalist Sam Whiting, "It was all the hallways I grew up in. They were poor, poor tenements, badly lit, narrow and confining. Hallways that had something to do with the economics of building for poor people." Subsequently, DeCarava collaborated with Langston Hughes on The Sweet Flypaper of Life, which was published in 1955.
A master image-maker and skilled photographic printer, DeCarava initially used the camera as a means of gathering information for his paintings, but became attracted to the medium's directness and flexibility. Working with a 35mm camera, DeCarava moved through the city streets with ease, taking images that he then developed and printed himself. Breaking with many of the social documentary trends of the time, DeCarava's imagery remains a poetic and tender record of black life in America. "I do not want a documentary or sociological statement," he wrote in his application for the Guggenheim; the goal was rather "a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret." This stunning and exceptionally rare vintage print is rendered in rich charcoal grays and deep blacks, exemplifying the subtle, evocative stillness that suffuses DeCarava's nuanced work.
Reproduced Peter Galassi, Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art, New York), p. 105
