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Celebrate the life and artistic legacy of Roy DeCarava…

C.S.’s father was an accomplished artist who was supremely and fiercely principled. Because of this he would eschew much of the acclaim that other less courageous artists would accept for themselves. DeCarava demanded that he be viewed as an artist, without qualification as an African American artist, or street artist, or a documentarian.

He took his camera everywhere he went. He lived and raised his family in Bed Stuy, but was born and raised uptown in Harlem. The art world tried to marginalize him because so many of his early subjects were the residents of the neighborhoods where he lived and worked. He knew that this made his subjects and his art no less great, even as the T.I.’s tried to say otherwise.

I’m proud to say that I was a fan of Roy DeCarava’s photographs decades before I had met him. In real life he was as compelling as the images he crafted. Speaking truth to power and expressing the beauty of it all, DeCarava is in large part the inspiration for why I do what I do.