In Shadow and Light

“Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective” is one of those rare and exciting exhibitions that make you slap your forehead in wonderment that you haven’t been intimately acquainted with his quietly powerful work all along. He’s been showing his richly printed, visually acute, emotionally touching photographs since 1947, but mostly in New York, where he was born and has lived almost all his life (he turns 77 on Dec. 9).

DeCarava’s photographs were the subject of small shows in Los Angeles and San Diego in 1982 and 1986, and he, of course, found a secure place in the pantheon of postwar photographers with the landmark publication of his 1955 book, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” for which Langston Hughes wrote a memorable text. But now that the Museum of Modern Art has assembled a full retrospective overview, the sweep of DeCarava’s achievement is self-evident. The show, which opened last week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the most important exhibition of photography to have been seen in L.A. this year.

It’s quite large, numbering some 200 pictures. For the most part they’re installed chronologically, beginning around 1950, but occasionally the photographs are grouped according to thematic or stylistic similarities, regardless of date. In sharp contrast to the dense, velvety black tones that are something of a trademark of DeCarava’s art, the gallery walls have been painted stark white.

Remarkably, as the show proceeds there isn’t much sense of an artist working out his tentative photographic ideas in his early years, then deepening and complicating them as his career unfolds and his art matures. He starts out full-throttle instead.

The earliest pictures show an exquisitely refined sensitivity that is sustained throughout the exhibition, whether DeCarava is photographing the ordinariness of street life in Harlem, friends at home, the greats of New York jazz, humdrum activity in the subway or civil rights demonstrations in the South. His photographic constancy may be a result of his own relative maturity when he began to use the camera in earnest.

DeCarava started as a painter. In the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance had been largely defined by writers and musicians determined to cultivate the vibrancy of black culture; in the wake of the Great Depression, however, the federal establishment of the WPA slowly created a network of visual arts activities.

In Harlem, young artists congregated around painters and sculptors like Augusta Savage, Aaron Douglas and Charles H. Alston. Having first studied painting and drawing at George Washington Carver Art School, by the late 1940s DeCarava had switched exclusively to printmaking, finding the graphic simplicity of silk-screening more to his taste.

As MOMA curator Peter Galassi explains in the excellent catalog that accompanies the show (the book also includes an insightful essay by art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, the artist’s wife), DeCarava, like Ben Shahn before him, eventually picked up a hand-held 35mm camera as a way of taking visual “notes” of urban life, for use in silk-screen images he wanted to make. Steadily more intrigued by the possibilities he saw in those camera sketches, which were recording aspects of black American life that could be witnessed almost no place else, he had by the end of the decade fully embraced photography as his medium.

Lucky for us that he did. DeCarava, then in his 30s, created a technically effective visual style that, in a kind of modern update of an early 17th century mode of painting, could be called “tenebrism with a camera.” Characterized by an emphasis on scenes engulfed in sensuous darkness and shadow, pierced by radiant moments of light, the style takes full advantage of the almost limitless range of rich grays possible from gelatin-silver prints.

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The result is that you don’t look at a photograph by Roy DeCarava, you peer into it. His pictures require close scrutiny simply to be seen. They slow the pace of your bodily and mental rhythms. Intimacy is established through seemingly effortless visual seduction.

“Gittel” (1950) shows how DeCarava’s pictures virtually blossom before your eyes. The crowded facades of an urban street are dominated at the right by the store front offices of one Morris Gittel, insurance broker, notary public, lawyer. The density of street signs, reflective transparency of windows and impenetrable stone building facades have been orchestrated into a vibrant jumble of receding, advancing and engulfing planes, which convey the energetic liveliness of a metropolitan environment.

Only after a few moments do you notice, there in the very center of the visual hubbub, the still, calm profile of a standing woman, dressed from head to toe in black. The woman is next to a stone pillar, her erect form echoing its resilient strength. She quietly becomes the stable axis around which DeCarava’s entire pictorial universe revolves.

Only after another moment do you see the pointing-finger entrance sign that’s been painted on the pillar. The painted finger points to Gittel’s office to direct the passing pedestrian--but it also points to the lady in black, subtly guiding the eye of DeCarava’s passing viewer.

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In his pictures of jazz musicians and singers, the intense concentration visible on the subject’s face suddenly gets mirrored in your own. In “Hallway” (1953), the path down a dingy tenement corridor leads to utter darkness surmounted by a bare light bulb--an unknowable future illuminated by a dim ray of hope.

DeCarava’s technique of causing the viewer to look close and hard creates a sense of dawning consciousness--of revelation that can pack a wallop. During the tumultuous civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s, for example, repeat viewing of news and television pictures could deaden the impact of those extraordinary events. But “Force, Downstate” (1963) restores their power.

The photograph shows an initially confusing, nearly abstract jumble of forms, which slowly coalesce into body parts, then clarify into an upside-down pair of legs being grasped at the ankles by different pairs of hands, as other bodies jostle in close. Suddenly you recognize what’s happening and let out a little gasp. The visceral power in the non-violent idea of a demonstrator’s body being carted off is dramatically renewed.

Anyone who says that art’s social and political content is more important than formal considerations--or can even be separated from them--should take a good long look at Roy DeCarava’s work. The vivid social impact of his pictures is integral to the elegant formal composition he remarkably establishes in the frame. Today, when so much mediocre art has been noisily advanced as significant solely because of the social or political posture it assumes, DeCarava’s magnificent art stands as both exceptional achievement and powerful corrective.

* “Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Jan. 26. Closed Mondays.