Dancers, New York (1956) © Roy DeCarava
I remember this photo from a Barney's New York ad, many years ago. I tore it out of a magazine and posted up on my wall. It was there for years. I didn't know who took it or where it was shot exactly, but I was just psyched on the mood and the dynamic, the animated position of the dancers. I think I could have guessed it was shot in a jazz club sometime in the '50s, probably up in Harlem.
Fast forward 20 plus years...
Driving home a few weeks ago, I heard over the radio of a passing of a photographer who had documented the lives of ordinary people up in Harlem. I vaguely remembered his name: Roy De something. I type it into my google search, then there it was: the very same picture that was pinned up in my wall all those years ago. I finally get info on the man behind the lens. Roy DeCarava passed away a few weeks ago, but his photos made a lasting impression and some how guided me on my creative journey.
-S. Choice
Below is an excerpt from a series of interviews with Sherry Turner DeCarava published in Roy DeCarava Photographs (1981).
"This photograph was taken at a dance of a social club at the 110th St. Manor at Fifth Avenue. It is about the intermission where they had entertainment and the entertainment was two dancers who danced to jazz music. That’s what this image is all about; it’s about these two dancers who represent a terrible torment for me in that I feel a great ambiguity about the image because of them. It’s because they are in some ways distorted characters. What they actually are is two black male dancers who dance in the manner of an older generation of black vaudeville performers. The problem comes because their figures remind me so much of the real life experience 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, to get along. In a way, these figures seem to epitomize that reality. And yet there is something in the figures not about that; something in the figures that is very
creative, that is very real and very black in the finest sense of the word. So there is this duality this ambiguity in the photograph that I find very hard to live with. I always have to make a decision in a case like this – is it good or is it bad? I have to say that even though it jars some of my sensibilities and reminds me of things that I would rather not be reminded of, it is still a good picture. In fact, it is good just because of those things and in spite of those things. The picture works."