Roy DeCarava’s Infinite Palette of Gray

This story was first published in Coronadiet’s old site on April 18, 2020.

Jazz enthusiasts are no strangers to American photographer Roy DeCarava’s work. The Harlem local captured a new blackness with his personal aesthetic and conceptual means through a selective use of natural light in discerning portraits of members in his community, which eventually came to include legendary musicians such as John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis. For better or worse, these iconic photographs of famous figures often eclipse DeCarava’s other explorations in his lesser-known domains of landscape, abstraction, and street photography.

DeCarava wasn’t impeded by the arbitrary conditions that were presented to him. He exploited situational factors like ambient light to position subjects in the background, in blackness, just as he sought out to do. This flexibility and creativity stretched across DeCarava’s practice to his preference for silver gelatin prints, made from the primary development process for black-and-white photographs, and he had a great appreciation for the imagination and discipline it took to create within such a medium. Rather than being confined to producing strictly black-and-white photographs, DeCarava explored the possibilities of “an infinite palette of gray tonalities.”

All the aspects of his admirable attitude remind me of the approach that I do my best to adhere to when creating visual work in both photography and graphite drawing: an appreciation for the “restrictions” of certain mediums and conditions, and thriving creatively in the unknown. Sometimes, I seem to be the only person around with a camera in hand when I encounter a striking street scene. Or I come across images that stir within me a craving to reinterpret them in graphite — in the manner of DeCarava’s “gray tonalities.”

In art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava’s words, “Conventionally, it is thought that you can choose what you make. You can choose the image. But more often, DeCarava would insist: the image chooses you.”