[The Guardian] The big picture: ​stepping towards the shadows in 1940s Harlem

The big picture: ​stepping towards the shadows in 1940s Harlem

Roy DeCarava’s picture of a woman all dressed up on a derelict street is rich in symbols and evocative of a troubled era

Roy DeCarava had been taking pictures in Harlem, where he grew up, for a decade when he came upon this scene of a young woman in the street in her graduation dress. DeCarava had mostly thought of photography as a means to an end – he had used a camera to produce aides-memoire for his painting. But around this time, 1949, his vocation changed and he became primarily a photographer.

Looking at this picture, and its uncanny symbolism, it is easy to see why. Harlem, during the civil rights years, was full of visual gifts from real life. The young black woman, briefly bathed in sunlight in her white silk, is stepping forward into a place of complicated shadows. Alone, she is flanked by an incomplete “Princ–” scrawled on a wall. Her eyes are drawn to the sleek lines of the Chevrolet advert, a promise of escape from the derelict streetscape, but an alternative means of transport, an antique trash cart, is also at hand. If you were staging Cinderella in racially divided New York in 1949, it would be hard to conjure a more evocative set.

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