Roy DeCarava initially pursued painting and printmaking with Charles White (see no. 17) at the George Washington Carver Art School in Harlem. He began to explore photography as a way to create sketches for his prints, but he was so taken with the medium that, by the 1940s, he changed his focus to photographs. DeCarava’s career received a significant boost in 1950, when Edward Steichen, the renowned photographer who had joined the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, saw DeCarava’s first photography exhibit and purchased three prints for the museum. In 1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award. 15

“Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective,” featuring fifty years of DeCarava’s photographs, was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and appeared at the Art Institute in 1996. On the occasion of the exhibition, the museum acquired DeCarava’s Man Coming Up Subway Stairs. The activity of the subway was an important early subject for DeCarava, who would start to photograph at 5:00 p.m., after his day job as an illustrator for an advertising agency. He set forth his goals for his photographs in his Guggenheim fellowship proposal:

• I want to photograph Harlem through the Negro People. Morning, noon, night, at work, going to work, coming home from work, at play, in the streets, talking, laughing, in the home, in the playgrounds, in the schools, bars, stores, libraries, beauty parlors, churches, etc. . . . I want to show the strength, the wisdom, the dignity of the Negro people. Not the famous and the well known, but the unknown and the unnamed, thus revealing the roots from which spring the greatness of all human beings. 16

Continued