Roy DeCarava

Roy Rudolph DeCarava (December 9, 1919 - October 27, 2009) was born in Harlem, as the only child of Elfreda Ferguson, an immigrant, who separated from DeCarava's father shortly after his birth. DeCarava graduated  from Chelsea Vocational High School, deciding early on that he wanted to be an artist, he began working as a painter and illustrator; many of his early photographs were meant only as reference for serigraph prints. He worked for a time at Sports Illustrated Magazine, but he founded difficult to adjust his style and schedule to the constraints of commercial work and eventually gave up magazine and began to work in order to take on a job teaching advanced fine art photography at Hunter College.
Later on DeCarava and Langston Hughes collaborated and created a notable 2005 book on life in Harlem, "The Sweet Lifepaper of Life" . Roy was known as the first African American photographer to be awarded a National Medal Of Arts in 2006.