Roy DeCarava
American, 1919–2009
Dancers, New York
INV-7390
Roy DeCarava
American, 1919–20091956, printed 1982
Dancers, New York
Roy DeCarava American, 1919–2009 →gelatin silver (developing-out-paper) prphotographic process
Date
1956, printed 1982
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Image: 33.1 × 22.1 cm (13 1/16 × 8 3/4 in.); Paper: 35.4 × 27.7 cm (13 15/16 × 10 15/16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Lucia Woods Lindley and Daniel A. Lindley, Jr.
Photographer Roy DeCarava employed darkness in his photographs both to depict African American skin and to encourage deeper and more sustained looking. In this photograph, taken at a dance hall on 110th Street in Harlem, the darkness makes it take a moment to distinguish the silhouettes of the two dancers in the foreground, and a moment longer to recognize in their frozen postures the gestures of minstrelsy. DeCarava later reflected: “Their figures remind me so much of the real-life experiences of blacks in their need to put themselves in an awkward position before the man, for the man; to demean themselves in order to survive. And yet, there is something in these figures . . . that is very creative, that is very real and very black in the finest sense of the word.”
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