1. Over a career that spanned nearly six decades, Roy DeCarava came to be known as a founder in the field of black and white fine art photography, advocating for an approach to the medium based on the core value of an individual, subjective creative sensibility, which was separate and distinct from the "social documentary" style of many predecessors.
Roy DeCarava was born in Harlem, New York on December 9,1919.
Roy DeCarava came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, when artistic activity and achievement among African Americans flourished across the literary, musical, dramatic, and visual arts.
Roy DeCarava continued his formal education at Cooper Union, where he studied painting, architecture, and sculpture.
Roy DeCarava expanded upon this early training at the Harlem Art Center as well as the George Washington Carver Art School, where in addition to painting he began to experiment with printmaking.
Roy DeCarava first began to use photography as a means to record and as reference for his paintings, but was so enthralled by the medium that he began devoting all of his time to it and championed black and white silver gelatin photography as an art form of its own.
Roy DeCarava used his camera to produce striking studies of everyday black life in Harlem, capturing the varied textures of the neighborhood and the creative efflorescence of the Harlem Renaissance.
Roy DeCarava produced five published art books, including The Sound I Saw and The Sweet Flypaper of Life, as well as landmark museum catalogs and retrospective surveys from the Friends of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The subject of at least 15 solo art exhibitions, Roy DeCarava was the first African-American photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship and as a result of the fellowship, was able to photograph his community and New York City for one year; expressing early creative impressions through the black and white silver gelatin process.
Gradually, Roy DeCarava became known for his dedication to the field of visual art and for his own work within it, including many distinctive black and white, silver gelatin photographs of great American musicians.
Roy DeCarava received honorary degrees from Rhode Island School of Design, the Maryland Institute of Art, Wesleyan University, The New School for Social Research, The Parsons School of Design and the Art Institute of Boston for contributions to American art.
Roy DeCarava encouraged other fine art photographers and believed in the accessibility of the medium.
Roy DeCarava taught for many years at Hunter College, in both its undergraduate and MFA programs.
In 1972 Roy DeCarava received the Benin Creative Photography Award for his contributions to the black community as a creative photographer.
Roy DeCarava received the 1996 Cooper Union President's Citation Award and the 2007 and the Cooper Union Alumni Association Augustus Saint Gaudens Award.
Roy DeCarava was inducted into the Cooper Union Hall of Fame in 2009.
Roy DeCarava died in New York City, on October 27,2009.
Roy DeCarava's work is held in the following permanent public collections:.