Gazelle Mba's "On Roy DeCarava"

Roy DeCarava, Hallway (1953)

Gazelle Mba’s “On Roy DeCarava" (London Review of Books, April 7, 2022) contains two wonderful descriptions of DeCarava’s work. She says of his Hallway (1953),

In the recent DeCarava retrospective at the David Zwirner gallery, Hallway stood out among the rows of silver gelatin prints. At first glance, it appears as a dense mass of what the curator Zoé Whitley called his ‘infinite palette of grey tonalities’, which take on volume in their shadowiness. It takes a second for your eyes to adjust, and to see the light in the background of the photo. A light that refuses illumination, a light that is no light. The two narrow walls converge into a vanishing point with no discernible horizon. The experience of seeing Hallway up close mimics what I imagine it was like to be there, unmoored, when everyone else had gone to bed. DeCarava seems to say that there is something about this light, this hallway, that won’t let him be, and he tries to draw out its meaning. He was fascinated by walls as an urban motif, walls so thin you can hear the neighbours yelling at their kids, walls that make you feel at home, crumbling walls with broken windows.

That “A light that refuses illumination, a light that is no light” is marvellously fine. Mba also provides an excellent description of DeCarava’s Graduation (1949):

Graduation (1949) shows a girl in white dress and white gloves, flowers pinned to her chest, jewellery about her neck and on her ears, her hair curled and styled to perfection. She is pristine. You sense the care and effort put into her appearance, the hours it took to get her looking this way. Sitting between some auntie’s legs while her hair was combed and pulled until it conformed to the desired style, the fabric for her dress and gloves sourced from the right place or bought new. Maybe the jewellery is an heirloom, reserved for moments like this. You would expect to find her at a ball, awash in bright light, surrounded by other tulled women, the air smelling like shea butter, hairspray and perfume mixed with peach schnapps for the grown-ups.

Instead she is alone in a vacant lot. Behind her is the skeleton of a demolished building, graffiti on the wall to her right, broken objects everywhere. There’s a pile of trash in the foreground, with a crumpled newspaper carrying a headline about South Korea. With the rest of the image in shadow, the girl stands in a square of light, walking forwards, calmly and deliberately, as if moving out of the weight and rubble of history into her own future. DeCarava happened on her by accident, but she knows where she’s going. The photograph seems to capture it all: wars, the state’s abandonment of Black urban centres, a young girl on her way to her graduation. But it doesn’t seek to synthesise these facts: no single one overwhelms or denies the existence of the others. Light and dark, mixed into DeCarava’s grey palette.

Those last two lines are inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a splendid appreciation of DeCarava’s subtle art. 

Postscript: See also Hilton Als’ terrific “Roy DeCarava’s Poetics of Blackness” (The New Yorker, September 23, 2019).