Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective
This survey of a half-century of photographer Roy DeCarava's (b. 1919) drawings, serigraphs, and photographs accompanies a traveling exhibition. DeCarava, the first African American to win a Guggenheim Fellowship (in 1952), illustrated Langston Hughes's The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), yet the only previous monograph on his work is out of print. Here, his wife, art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, provides a perceptive essay about his early life, his first drawings and serigraphs, and the emergence of his expressive, unsentimental, and sometimes abstract photographic style, which makes his work immediately recognizable. Galassi, chief curator of photography for the Museum of Modern Art, surveys DeCarava's career and influences and provides new information on one of the earliest photographic galleries in New York City, A Photographer's Gallery, opened by the DeCaravas in their home. The quality of the works reproduced here, which often focus on black life in New York City, is superb. Highly recommended for photography, black history, and music collections.?Kathleen Gail Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, BrooklynCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.