Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava’s painterly photographs typically depict people in his native Harlem and explore their relationship to light. Though this photograph has his characteristic attention to gray tones and formal composition, Hallway is unique. In a 1981 interview, DeCarava described this work:

It’s about a hallway that I know I must have experienced as a child. Not just one hallway; it was all the hallways that I grew up in. . . . They were poor, poor tenements, badly lit, narrow and confining; hallways that had something to do with the economics of building for poor people. The ambience, the light in this hallway was so personal, so individual that any other kind of light would not have worked. . . . It was frightening, it was scary, it was spooky, as we would say when we were kids. And it was depressing. And yet, here I am an adult, years and ages and ages later, looking at the same hallway and finding it beautiful.

"It's about a hallway that I know I must have experienced as a child. Not just one hallway; it was all the hallways that I grew up in. They were poor, poor tenements, badly lit, narrow and confining; hallways that had something to do with the economics of building for poor people. When I saw this particular hallway I went home on the subway and got my camera and tripod, which I rarely use. The ambience, the light in this hallway was so personal, so individual that any other kind of light would not have worked. It just brought back all those things that I had experienced as a child in those hallways. It was frightening, it was scary, it was spooky, as we would say when we were kids. And it was depressing. And yet, here I am an adult, years and ages and ages later, looking at the same hallway and finding it beautiful." (Roy DeCarava, 1981)