Roy DeCarava

"The motivation at that moment was my political understanding of the treatment of black people and their response to injustice. This moment occurred during a memorial service for the children killed in a church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1964. The photograph shows men coming out of the service at a church in Harlem. I was aware of all this, and I wanted to make a picture, to commemorate that day. I wasn't there at the bombing, I wasn't in the church, but I knew what it was and I wanted to make a picture that dealt with it. The [five] men were coming out of the church with faces so serious and so intense, and the image was made." (Roy DeCarava, 1990)