Description:
two men dancing in center of photograph; interior space;
Label Text:
A life long resident of New York City, Roy De Carava began taking photographs in the 1940s after an extended period of studying painting, drawing, and printmaking, first at Cooper Union and later at the Harlem Community Art Center. De Carava began making silkscreen prints illustrating the daily lives of Harlem residents, and it was in gathering images for his prints that he first began to take photographs.
De Carava was able to take full advantage of the increasing use by artists in the 1940s of 35mm cameras. Small, fast, and portable, these cameras allowed spontaneous image-making. As he worked during the day as an illustrator for an advertising agency, many of De Carava's photographs are night scenes. These often softly focused images are sensitively printed, making the best use of dim and atmospheric lighting. The darkened interior and dramatic lighting of The Dancers, New York perfectly captures the stylized movements of the dancers and the energy of a bustling nightlife scene.
The artist was conflicted about this image, as the two dancing men, in his words, "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. . . ."
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1988.17.1 |
