Visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art may be puzzled at a new photography retrospective that offers pictures almost entirely composed of grey and black forms.

But those forms contain a world in themselves — a world that their composer, African American photographer Roy DeCarava, lives in and clearly respects.

DeCarava has pulled off the rare trick of turning a formal difficulty into an artistic achievement: he transforms the dark, shadowy spaces of New York’s Harlem ghetto into a magic place where darkness has a life of its own.

Born in 1919 in Harlem, DeCarava extended the tradition of the artists of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ of the 1920s and 1930s, in which black artists concentrated on African American life and history.

The artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, insisted that form as well as content reflected the black experience — a lesson DeCarava learned in his own dramatic use of shadow and light.

The current retrospective, offering some 200 photographs from 1949 until 1994, shows the fruits of that lesson. From photographs documenting the lives of Harlemites from the 1950s until today to portraits of some of jazz music’s greatest legends, DeCarava’s most poignant works are on display.

Among them are some of the 140 photos that DeCarava published in a 1955 book, ‘The Sweet Flypaper of Life’, which featured accompanying text by the noted Harlem poet-author Langston Hughes.

Those photos were the first images many people saw of Harlem, at a time when the neighbourhood was a symbol of black aspirations for advancement and creativity. People featured in ‘The Sweet Flypaper of Life’ are resolutely normal: holding each other, smiling, cooking, walking down streets, and simply being alive.

What is special is the rare grace with which DeCarava captures them. Enveloping them in the placid grey tones typical of his work, the photographer selected for his shots moments of quietude in which the dignity of the people he portrayed could naturally emerge.

Peter Galassi, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief photography curator, says of DeCarava’s achievement: “He brought a new gentleness and intimacy to photography, creating an image of life that is at once tender, grave, and unsentimental.”

But the photos also capture the harsh reality of black life in subtle, unexpected ways. ‘Man coming up the subway stairs’, from 1952, depicts the tired grimace of a black worker, and the wrinkles of his shirt and hat, after he climbs up the subway steps on his way home from a hard day’s work. (MORE)

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