ART REVIEW : PHOTO EXHIBIT BEAUTIFUL, UNPRETENTIOUS

The exhibition “Roy DeCarava: Between Time” now at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa is one of the most beautiful and unpretentious that the museum has had in some time.

It is not a great exhibition of photographs, although there may be some great photographs in it. It is, more importantly, profoundly human and moving--some images are achingly so. The artist’s ego does not get in the way of our experience of the art. He eschews becoming the subject of his work and a barrier to it. He remains, as he should, a medium.

The exhibition surveys 40 years of the career of a distinguished artist, the first black photographer to document black life in New York City.

It is surely his identification with his subject that is the source of the truth of his vision. As a native black New Yorker, he knows the life of blacks from the inside and he understands the “black aesthetic.”

“Yes, there is a black aesthetic,” DeCarava states on a videotape accompanying the exhibition. “If it doesn’t survive, black people can’t survive, and I will do all I can to ensure that it survives.”

“The black aesthetic,” he said during an interview in The Times in early 1984, “is simply a consciousness of our predicament and our history and a sense that something has to be done, a sense of wanting to be free, of wanting to survive. These are things that other groups take for granted: blacks don’t.

“No matter how high or low most blacks are, they know they are endangered. They have to react to this basic position, either ignore it or deal with it. I think artists, being very conscious, have to deal with it. And that is the black sensibility.”

DeCarava possesses all the skills needed for the realization of his humanistic vision. He began developing them as a child, drawing with chalk on the streets of Harlem. He studied art at night at The Cooper Union Institute from 1938 to 1940 while working as a commercial artist during the day for the WPA art project. The only black student in the school, he sensed a certain coolness, so he left to attend the Harlem Art Center to study painting and printmaking for two years. Later he studied painting with famed black artist Charles White at the George Washington Carver Art School. In addition to the influence of White, he responded to the emotional intensity of Van Gogh.

The artist became involved with photography as a means of sketching ideas for paintings, but soon began to appreciate it as an independent medium.

In 1950, he had his first solo exhibition in New York and received the important support of Edward Steichen, director of the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art. Two years later he received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the first black artist so honored. In 1955, Steichen included his works in the memorable “Family of Man” exhibition. Some of his photographs from this period were published in black poet Langston Hughes’ book “The Sweet Flypaper of Life.”

DeCarava supported himself as a free-lance commercial photographer and from 1968 to 1975 was under contract to Sports Illustrated. Since 1975, he has been a professor of art at Hunter College in New York.

Although his works have been exhibited widely, his reputation is not so widely known as his professional prestige merits. Museum director Arthur Ollman organized this exhibition in part to adjust that imbalance.

DeCarava’s photographs are, first of all, works of art whose formal qualities evince their maker’s mastery of the medium. They are beautifully composed and often show a kind of modified minimalism complemented by a predilection for dark tones, although the images typically possess the traditionally respected full range of values from white through grays to black.

Prints such as “Boy Looking Out Candy Store Window” (1950); “Window Shade Cord” (1961); “Wall, Bedspread, Pennsylvania” (1963); “Boy Playing, Man Walking” (1966); “Neck” (1976) and “Blinds and Curtains” (1981) are not only illustrations of this characteristic, they are evidence of its continuity through four decades. The simplest, most nearly purely abstract are compositions of traffic-dividing lines in streets.

Minimalism applies to tonality as well. The portrait in profile “Leslie, Movie” (1954) is a tour de force of monochromaticism, but the full-face portrait “Danlyn” (1955) is a poem in black-on-black--a consummate work of art.

There are many engaging photographs of black people in the streets of New York--of women caring for children, of children playing and of adults going about adult activities. The “Girl in Print Dress” (1949) is so shy that she almost disappears. The hand-in-hand “Couple Walking, Park Avenue” (1960) convey such love, even viewed from behind, that you want to follow them.

There are also many urban building facades and traditional scenes such as “Clotheslines” (1949).

And there glorious portraits of great jazz artists--”Billie Singing” (1959), a broad, gray, flat face; “Mahalia Jackson” (1957), all bosom and hands, and “Elvin Jones” (1961), among others.

The artist’s work is about love. Its epigraph is, appropriately, the words of Langston Hughes: “I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.”

The exhibition continues through Feb. 8.