An Unsung Visionary
Light Break by Roy DeCarava. Zwirner Gallery, 2019, $65.00 cloth. the sound I saw by Roy DeCarava. Zwirner Gallery, 2019, $75.00 cloth.
THERE WERE two things Roy DeCarava, a son of Harlem who made a lifelong, loving study of deep dark and its attendant grays, regretted never having photographed. One was Charlie Parker. And after Bird? The wind. “I’ve seen the wind at work, so to speak,” he told an interviewer once, with a bright-eyed chuckle and—as was soon clear—entire earnestness, the following emphasis his: “I don’t want to photograph what it makes move.”
DeCarava was after the thing itself, whether beholding Coltrane in a hurry of notes or the man making his slow, sure progress up some subway steps, each one an utterly singular individual and still an exemplary presence, each one an occasion for DeCarava’s radiantly complete attention. The pictures we encounter in and , two volumes published by the Zwirner Gallery in 2019 to mark the late photographer’s centennial, arrive at a crystalline sense of repose, ordinary life seen by way of an extraordinary inwardness—the photographer’s opening out on that of his subjects. Gracing the beginning of is a picture of Edna Smith at the bass, as commanding in her concentration and as enigmatic in her nearness to us as anything in Vermeer.
