Episode 25: Shades of Gray

[Music] In 2021, I had the pleasure of handling a photograph by Roy Dick Rava that I've always loved, but I've also been a little mystified by. The lower third of the image is very dark, made up of various charcoal tones. The upper portion is inky black, with just a few pops of white that register as ceiling lights. Looking closely, however, you can just make out two figures in strange poses. These two men always look to me like other worldly apparitions. When I looked at other prints of the image, like once at the Art Institute of Chicago or the National Gallery of Art, I noticed they were cropped wider and printed brighter, so that you can actually see that the image is of a dance hall. People are gathered at the edges, and the two figures in the middle are engaged in an energetic dance. It's a great example of how you can make two totally different pictures from the same negative, and by extension, every photograph tells a unique story. The photo I handled at Sethubes had an almost spectral, heavy feeling, while the others are just low-light photographs of a night in a Harlem dance hall. This all got me thinking about the choices we make as photographers. How does one develop a style or preference? Are those decisions that we make unconsciously, or are they born out of a need to express something deeper? Luckily for me, I met someone who had some insight that would help me answer this question, at least in regards to this photograph. This is The Expert Eye. [Music] Roy Day Carava was born in Harlem, New York in 1919, during what became known as the Harlem Renaissance. This period was an explosion of cultural activity, and it made an indelible mark on Day Carava, who would be a huge fan of music and art for his entire life. Unfortunately, there was another experience that also left a profound mark on him, and that was his experience in the US Army as a black man. He was drafted in 1942 and said to Louisiana and Virginia. During this time, he experienced racism so intense, he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. In the essay for a 1996 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, curator Peter Galasi quoted him as saying, "The only place that wasn't segregated in the Army was the psychiatric ward of the hospital. I was in the Army for about six or seven months altogether, but I had nightmares about it for 20 years." After the Army, Day Carava started painting, but after experimenting with a camera, he devoted himself thereafter to photography. From the very beginning, Day Carava realized that most of his contemporaries in photography were portraying black individuals in what he perceived almost as caricature. And if you looked at major publications at the time, there were few images that were showing realistic portrayals of life, for individuals who weren't white. Day Carava wasn't seeing photographs of what he saw himself in black neighborhoods, homes and lives. So from the very beginning, he set out to show black Americans with all of the dignity they deserved. His work was never obvious or beat you over the head with its message, but instead was subtle, layered, and quiet. He photographed children at play, portraits of people he knew, families on stupes, workmen in the street, and jazz musicians, and dark clubs. It was everyday life. And in this respect, it was revolutionary. Something else that's really noticeable about his work is the rich tonality of his prints, which I mentioned briefly before. He's able to draw out more shades of gray than anyone I've ever seen. His prints are richly detailed, and they're masterfully printed. So all of this said, "It's important for you to keep in mind that when Day Carava was producing some of his most impactful images in the 1950s, it was a time in which there was racism soaking into practically everything, even photographic film. Now, how you ask can film be racist?" Well, it all has to do with a Kodak company and a little something called the Shirley Card. In the 1950s, Kodak produced most of the film in the country. And when they needed to make a reference card for photo labs to calibrate skin tones, they needed a model to show alongside their tonal charts. So they asked a Kodak employee named Shirley to pose. On the finished card, which was distributed worldwide, Shirley is featured at the center, surrounded by various color bands and grayscale boxes. And because Shirley was white, this means that the film itself was calibrated for pale skin. And it wasn't just in still photographic film either. This was the case for motion picture film as well. If you had a white person and a black person in the same frame, you would have had a really hard time trying not to have the darker skin person show up as just a large black shape, with no detail whatsoever. And it's interesting to note that it wasn't until 1995 that Kodak finally made a card that featured women of different ethnicities, 1995. And it wasn't because they were afraid of losing clients of color, because they didn't even consider how it could have been a problem. Instead, they had professional clients, like a furniture company, who were seeking better exposures for their products. So back to De Carrava, who showed himself to be a really incredible printer and technician from the start. He knew the problems of the films and papers he was dealing with, and because he understood the root problem, he could work on a solution. If you look at his prints, you can see that he modulated the tonalities and exposures with lyricism. There's a huge range of tone and detail within all of those shades of gray. Not only did he manage to overcome the difficulties of the film and paper, but he also understood the technical demands of using a handheld camera, because he spent a lot of time taking pictures and dark jazz clubs. A lot of people may not be aware that De Carrava was also a dedicated educator. He taught for years at Hunter College in New York, and he was named a distinguished professor and influenced hundreds of students in the MFA program. So in order to get some insight about how De Carrava taught, but also how he approached his photographic process, I sat down with Saul Robbins, who worked with De Carrava as a teaching assistant beginning in 1996. Okay, so I wanted a group of San Francisco, and I ended up going to school at UC Santa Cruz for undergraduate. And my professor there suggested that I consider looking at schools on the East Coast, and he mentioned that Roy De Carrava was professor at Hunter. So when I, and this was at a time I had been out of school for a while, and I was deciding I really needed to go back to school for myself, but also because I really wanted to teach. And I felt that I would definitely want to have the masters. So I ended up coming to New York, I went to Hunter, I went to ICP, and I actually didn't get to meet Professor De Carrava at the time. He was, I didn't know, and the way that the school function, I don't think was great on communication, but he had Wednesday office hours only, and I was there on another day. So I actually didn't ever get to meet him until school started, but I definitely knew about him and had incredible respect and admiration for his work. And I thought what an incredible opportunity to study with someone who I really felt was a master, and I just had this sense, like a real feeling, as well as the knowledge and respect for him. So the first semester I immediately signed up for independent study with him with another graduate student, and went in and showed him our prints and we talked. We had a relatively nice rapport, there was some joking around. I think I remember he said to my, I think, yeah, my friend was not a great printer, or my new friend was not a great printer, and I was a pretty good printer at the time, and I think he said something like, to my friend, you need to figure out how to print, and he said to me, and you need to figure out what to photograph, or something like that. But it was sort of joking, you know, obviously there was some truth to it. And that's why I went to graduate school, right, in a sense to figure out what to photograph. But it was good nature, it was not condemning or anything like that, and I have a sense of humor if you ask my students, they would never speak about that too. And I'm pretty good. And what year was that? So this was in 1996. Okay. Yeah. In the fall, you know, except, you know, basically August, September, 96. And so I entered into this independent study with him, and I'm, I can't remember exactly how often I'd be. with him, but I was shooting street at the time, black and white, and I'd go out and shoot, and I'd go to the darkroom and print, and I'd bring back my work prints, and we'd talk, and I've greatly appreciated his thoughts and insights and his critique about the pictures, as well as his comments about printing. And then probably sometime later that semester, he invited me to be his teaching assistant, which I didn't realize at the time, but I was the first person he had asked to be as teaching assistant in a while. So it felt like such an incredible honor, and something that I feel deeply appreciative and respectful of, you know, still, and I, in a sense, bring that experience, the rest of that experience, which we'll talk about, I bring into my classroom and into my awareness and thinking about photography and teaching and respect for people at such a concert. What did that entail? The teaching assistant? Going to the darkroom, arriving probably a little bit early, setting up the chemistry, and setting up everything for everybody, answering questions for the students, and basically, DeRoye was sitting in the office. He'd have some jazz playing on the stereo, because there was like a PA system and it would pipe into the darkroom, and he would sit there, and students would come to them with their wet prints and ask for his input, and I would handle everything else, on the wet side, so to speak. And then sometimes the students would ask me a question, or I'd hear what they said. They said, "Roye said this," and I'd say, "Oh, yeah, I see that, and you know, make another one, and then I'd look at it, they might show it to me," and I'd say, "Oh, you should go show it to Roy now." That allowed you a good amount of time, you know, listening to him and hearing him and I act with students. Absolutely. Yeah, and I think for me, you know, sort of my curiosity, and I had already been teaching before, you know, like in high school and a few adult at a situations back in California. So I had, was interested in, you know, cleaning as much as I could, and I always liked those interactions, and then there were class critiques, and then he would have these, I don't think he had midterm finals, were definitely one-on-one in the office, closed door, and at the beginning I wasn't invited for that, but, you know, there were class critiques, and so I would sit in, and I don't know that I said much. I felt like I wanted to be pretty respectful. And then at some point he invited me to come into the office for the final critiques, and I think he either said or was implied that I should just stay quiet, and that was fine. New York, San Francisco, California, very different relationships to, you know, and respect, let's say, on hierarchies and things like that, and I appreciated that, and also I think now looking back, it was good to be quiet, because I could pay attention to what was being said and not to what I might be thinking. Yeah, and the students would, you know, at that point they'd bring in their dry prints, and then there would be some sort of discussion, and Roy would talk about everything from technical to aesthetic to really interpersonal, or really intra-personal, I would say, because he had this incredible ability to see your work and then see you, and I don't mean like you're taking pictures of fruit, and he knows that you like, a healthy diet, but like something deeper about, you know, why you like a healthy diet, and what's going on, and maybe there's some, you know, history of illness or survival or family or other stuff, and stuff would come up in the classroom that was almost like therapeutic. You know, teeth as well. It was a terrible gift to read that much into people, to be that, I guess, aesthetic about somebody's situation just through their photographs. Yeah, it's so perceptive, and for me, personally, I come from a family where my family is all psychologists, except for myself. My father became one after a long career in dentistry, but basically this sort of psychodynamic, the value on psychodynamic, I don't know, you know, work let's say, has always been a big family, you know, appreciation, let's say. So it was fascinating to me to think about, you know, how perceptive Roy was, and what people would be willing to talk about through their work. And that became influential both for myself as an educator and as a photographer. Well, it must have been something about his manner, about his way of dealing with his students that gave them the comfort and the trust in him to be able to talk to him that way. And I guess I wanted to ask you a little bit about his interactions with his students, and you know, if there was a common theme for some of the advice that he was giving, if you were saying the same sorts of things come up that might reflect in his own work. So I think that's a really good question. I think that technically there was always very similar advice. And this was, that sort of, it sort of humors in a way, but it was really profound. He was always telling everybody to drop their contrast level. And, you know, at the time, and I think still, you know, papers are, you can get graded black and white papers, but often really people are using a multi-grade paper where you can change out the filtration either in the head of the enlarger or you can literally put a filter in between the, you know, the film and the lens. And he was always really exclaiming, drop your filter. You know, so, and it was pretty interesting because what happens is, you know, in a, let's say a higher contrast, your blacks get black, your whites get really white, but in order to get detail, you either have to hold back the blacks or you have to burn in the whites on lot. And when you drop your filtration, and he would usually say like, he was like a huge fan of like a zero or maybe a one half or a one filter, which kind of blew me away at first. I thought, that's guys can nuts. So like, you know, because I was printing with twos and threes at least. But what happens is the moment you drop your filtration, especially significantly by like a full step, you have more time in which to build up your white density, because it's lowering the contrast. And so you can add that extra light. And it fills it in, so to speak, those white, you know, those light tones. And then in a way, it slows down the blacks and your, and your, you know, your darker densities. And then that combined with a longer development time allows you to have this incredible control. And in a way, let's say to sculpt and really to manipulate, you know, in the way one might think about darker manipulation, like I'm using my hands right now, just thinking about it. You can really start to move or bring out or hold back what you want in order to elicit in your viewer, a much stronger, and more appropriate to your own interpretation, you know, that kind of a result. So he was always telling the students, drop your filter. And you know, it wasn't yelling or anything like that. He wasn't that kind of a traumatic guy. But it was, you know, it was like the dark rematra. And it's interesting because he, his own photographs are these, like he said, sculpted, you know, very, very tonally rich prints because there aren't any really inky blacks. It's all grades of charcoal in those darkest areas. So you're still able to see a lot of detail, you know, a lot of, I guess, modulation in those tones. It's not just black or white. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's true. And I've seen a fair amount of this work. And it's incredible how dark it is, you know, like viewing it when I went to see the major retrospective. I had this black overcoat and I kept holding it over me so I could lock out all the reflections and just get absorbed in that darkness. But it's not a darkness that's inappropriate. He's really bringing us, you know, like I would say he's bringing that out in his prints. And he's also allowing us to be brought into the space in which he works. It's kind of magical in a way that a photograph is. Yeah. And then to talk about like the other side of the teaching, he was, you know, sort of as my earlier comment about first meeting him, he was very straightforward, very direct. You know, I said like a no-be, you know, bullshit kind of a guy. But he wasn't playing around. He wasn't joking around and making fun of people. He saw people in some, like we're saying, some incredibly perceptive, sensitive, and I think just greatly respectful way. He certainly had his opinions about people like we all do. But with the students, he wasn't there to criticize them. He was there to critique them, to help them to grow and to build either an uvra, let's say, to use the arts he worked or to build something just really about themselves. And there were some seniors who took his class semester after semester. And they They were just a very devoted following and they were there really for that part, you know, just to become better photographers and better at seeing and better technically. The Friends of Photography monograph on Roy De Kharava has an extensive essay at the beginning, but she mentions, she uses this phrase, "emotional landscapes." So I think a lot of Roy's photographs, even if they're not obviously landscapes, if they're taken inside of their portrait, of a table with ketchup sitting on it, they all seem to be imbued with this, I guess, emotional information. And part of that is through printing choices, but you can really tell there's a lot behind just the obvious subject matter. Can you talk a little bit about the way he would discuss photographs with his students and how he would ask them to, you know, leave out certain things, add certain things, change the way that they were printing in order to, you know, get some more oath out of the subject matter? Yeah, that's a great question. It was so long ago that, obviously, the verbatim discussion is lost, but it was a lot about recognizing what was really important in the image. And I think recognizing how that thing was important to the person and Roy's understanding of the person. And therefore saying, "Okay, well, let's say there's a street shot and there's three people walking and XYZ, but really this one person is the more important protagonist, let's say, and how do you, the student, make sure to highlight them in a way that either brings them to the forefront or puts them in the back that may allow for a more theatrical reading to better understand the dynamics going on, you know, if it's less a social, personal political, something like that, or it's just physical, you know, how we move through urban space. And using this filtration, you know, or this lower contrast approach would allow you to open up the space and then if you need to, to darken or to lighten even more so through burning and dodging, the areas that you want to express, whatever it is you wanted to express, or clearly and more succinctly. And in a way, because we are talking about art, you know, more dramatically, not to be screaming, but maybe not to be so quiet that one doesn't pick up. And that's probably a lot of like the incredible strength of Tikarov's work. There's such a well-balanced quality in his prints where the aesthetic really serves the message and the message feeds into it. And you know, you can't in a way get just lost in it and both receive, let's say, or into it a just an appreciation, and quite probably, I think for sure, it's not even probable for me, really, you know, receive, so to speak, something incredibly profound. And his work is, you know, is so much about the black experience. And, you know, like I'm thinking of, there's the picture of I think it's window and stove, the picture of a kitchen. It's in sweet light paper, and it's in, I think it's in the first book published by friends. You know, it's just a stove and a funky old stove. It's in a 30 window and all that, but it says so much about home and life. And I think it says a lot about poverty and race relations and economics. And it's not just quote unquote a picture. It's enough to write a dissertation. It's enough to inspire deep social change. You know, this is just incredibly profound. And it's quote unquote just a picture of so and so. >> The really the reason why I started getting so into what Dekrava was because of one photograph. It's one that I love so much is of two dancers alone in the middle of this dance hall. There's people sitting along the other side. You can see a waiter in the distance. But there, it's just these two men dancing alone and their bodies are contorted in this almost like comic book monster, like sort of way. And depending on how this print is printed, it takes on a completely different feel. It can be so dark that you can barely make out these dancers on the dance floor, let alone anybody else sitting in the room. And it's like a spooky dream. And then you look at another print of the image, which is much brighter. You can see all those details. You understand what's happening. And the brain can make sense of the situation. And the picture completely changes, obviously. So he was very aware of how printing this photograph differently could affect the way of your season, the interpretation of the image, and can help him sort of get up point across. Because I know that this image was one that he had a lot to say about personally. But maybe you can talk a little bit about the different prints that you've seen and if you've perceived any of those things as well. I've never seen the degree of darkness that you showed me in that image. I've usually seen it, let's say, either from the book or maybe even a little bit darker than the way it's printed in the book, which, you know, the book is about public. It's about communication. And so it would serve the publisher and the artist, you know, in a sense unless it's really meant to be super dark, it serves them to have it a little more open. I've always loved that image, you know, dancers. It's just absolutely beautiful. And it's because it's so expressive. And I would say, like, they're sort of like, I went and saw this. You know, it's interesting that you said the word monster because I think it's almost like, you know, for lack of a better word. It's like deeply emotional, physical, tribal, spiritual, in the sense of where movement and dance and music can take one. Because we both dance at some point, if not, if not in the last 48 hours, you know, at some point, you know, we know what it means to move and we know what it means to be inspired to this sort of like deeply, you know, carnal, let's say or physical desire to just let our bodies express ourselves. And I think the image, what I've always loved about it is it shows that. And as a white man, I think it shows a very different way of dancing than I sometimes dances a white person. But also at the same time, it shows the sense that I have as maybe as I've gotten older and understanding my body and letting it move. Well, now I have an eight year old and watching him move like just it's just in you and you don't want to control it or hopefully you don't want to control it. You want to let yourself just be a conduit for the music to in a way to move from the musicians into and through you and then just out wherever it goes. It doesn't have a negative impact on whoever receives it. So that I think to print it too dark in a way, I think actually loses a lot of what I'm just talking about because you can barely make out the people. It may be more accurate to the situation. Although it's not a very long shutter speed, they're moving. I don't know if they were moving very slowly or not, but we're not talking half a second. I don't think. And they're not out of focus really. And he was shooting with a handheld camera in a very, very dark environment, you know, nightclub. So it's not like he was there for a really long time. He snapped and moved on. Yeah. And though I don't know how many he snapped of this gentleman or of other people. That's always such an interesting question to be answered when we see an exhibition and there's more of that ephemera. I imagine he may have shot a few. Maybe he was playing with shutter speed. It didn't been so expressive. And then I think the printing, my guess is the darker image was probably printed earlier with a graded paper and graded papers were what was around. I don't know when multi-grade papers were invented, but probably in the 70s, I'm just not sure. But it might have been that he printed it on a dark paper and he was very careful in controlling his images and dissemination of them or sale of them. So I doubt that was taken without his knowledge. But my thought would be that it's an early print and therefore before he was able to was able to glean, so to speak, or to imbue the richness that the full potential of that image can have. And by going lower in contrast, you're allowed to open up that darkness without losing contrast. And that was the other thing I forgot to say earlier, people usually print higher contrast because they think it's got to be darkness, got to be white, that's what our contrast grays are. And he was emphatic. And I am now equally emphatic, that you don't need in a way to have this high contrast approach. It's almost like you don't need to hit something over the head. You can be gentle, you can be slow, patient, and you can maybe even the metaphor of like, you're almost helping the work speak for itself because you are using the full potential of the chemistry, of the origination of that image to bring out really whatever it is that you saw and responded to. And that is something that I think Roy really brought into the two he's teaching. He was always about helping the student express themselves better. And as we know from his work, it didn't matter if it's a crush can, a flower, an elbow, or what's that great image of the person from behind is just holding this very dark black portfolio or briefcase or something in his fingers. They're just so beautifully and elegantly holding that. The simplest things can be so expressive through his work. So let's just go back to the photograph I was telling you about at the very beginning of the episode. The one of the dancers in a darkened club. I want to read to you what Day Corava himself thought about it. He said, "Their figures remind me so much of the real life experiences of blacks and their need to put themselves in an awkward position before the men, to demean themselves in order to survive." And yet there's something in these figures that's very creative, that is very real, and very black in the finest sense of the word. So on one hand, he acknowledges that the distorted bodies of the men could be red as symbolic of the demanding contortions that black people go through to survive in this world. But on the other hand, Day Corava saw the creative and the real and the powerful all contained within those shades of gray, when the rest of the world only wanted to see one homogenous black tone. He was able to master his craft within the confines of a system that was so racist that even film did not escape its grasp. Ray Day Corava was the first black American to win a Guggenheim fellowship. During his life, he produced five books and was featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum. He died in 2009 at the age of 89. This episode of The Expert Eye was written by me Amy Flieger, and edited by Ivan Sero in Bedstuy Brooklyn. My interview with Saul Robbins took place over Zoom in April 2024. Please visit theexpert eye.org for more information and to see photographs by Roy Day Corava. I'll also post a link to a fascinating episode on a podcast called 99% Invisible about Shirley Cards that is a must listen. Until next time, Google cautiously, blacklight judiciously, and do not handle prints under the influence of intoxicants.