Roy Decarava Looking

R O Y D E C A R A V A GEOFFREY JACQUES T h e photogra* li s central image is an o p e n space ween t w o s e a t e d fig ores, o p p o site e n d s of the r o o m . O v e r h e a d , n i n e s t u d i o lights, their b u l b s slightly exposed, shine into o u r eyes. A coat rack with a ch zen coats o n it si Is at dead center; J..»\ e are at least o n e dozen hats, I am l o o k i n g at a pause in a e i r ding session, here p h o t o g r a p h e d by Roy 1)e Carava. Op p osit e page: Jimmy Scott, Singing, 1 9 5 6 . Ab ov e: Ketchup Bottles, Table and Coat, 1 9 5 2 . Journal of Contemporary African Art • Fall/winter 1996 De Carava's work pauses to ask the hard space, who, precisely, lives and works there, T he photographer tells us so much that is essential about the nature of the music these men create without showing us a single musical reference or prop (not even a sheet of music or an instrument case!) anywhere in the picture. The two men are members, so the photo's title (Ellington Session Break, 1954) tells us, of the Duke Ellington orchestra. They sit at each end of the room, separated like lovers after particularly intense lovemaking ; each now lost in his own private world. And there, in the center of the room the filled coat rack symbolizes absence; each band member has chosen to separate himself from the room itself. The in effect, to scramble our own senses as we look at what is undoubtedly a scene "found" in the "nature" of the city. Photography, says Susan Sontag, is "the one art that has managed to carry out the grandiose, century-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility." The way De Carava plays with light and shadow is a precise demonstration of this assertion. In this photographer's eerie, mysterious city, we get a glimpse of a metafictional dimension that mirrors our own world. Take "Hoyt and Schermerhorn," (1985), in which the bare overhead bulbs do precious little to illuminate the space beneath them. But each bulb, glowing in the darkness, provides Left to right: Fashion Cenimi, 1962; Woman Walking, 1950; TwoMen, Torsos, 1979. contrast between the two men relaxing in the room and the intensity of the overhead lights suggest something about the nature of jazz music itself: here is a force so intense that the end of music-making terminates the communicative impulse itself. And we are left, finally, with a room filled with visual echoes, a room populated by suggestive props. I've often found De Carava's studied casualness disturbing, as if he and I have just walked past a comer where the most where I, blind as a bat, passed the most extraordinary event without noticing a thing. Nothing essential in the minutiae of the city escapes De Carava's eye. His photos are carefully executed compositions of light and accidental elements. He sets nothing up, but finds his extraordinary juxtapositions everywhere. When the light source itself is visible, it is almost never ancillary; it is integrated to such a degree that it becomes, itself, a vital part of the composition. In the photo described above, the light sources seem to do little to illuminate the scene itself, even though both men in the picture are reading. The lightbulb's more important function seems to be to shine into the faces of the viewer. The disassociation of light from it's presumed function works, light for it's own individualized space. The subway passageway becomes a universal underground chamber in which history, at some point, might take place. But in the present, those who know the space portrayed by the photo to be a subway platform might find this portrait somewhat...