Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by Roy DeCarava

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist Roy DeCarava.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Roy Rudolph DeCarava was an American artist. DeCarava received early critical acclaim for his photography, initially engaging and imaging the lives of African Americans and jazz musicians in the communities where he lived and worked. Over a career that spanned nearly six decades, DeCarava came to be known as a founder in the field of black and white fine art photography, advocating for an approach to the medium based on the core value of an individual, subjective creative sensibility, which was separate and distinct from the "social documentary" style of many predecessors.

American - Artist | December 9, 1919 - October 27, 2009

Source: Wikipedia

I try to photograph things that are near to me because I work best among things I know. I'm not concerned with startling anyone or discovering new forms; formal qualities are only tools to help state my message.

Roy DeCarava

Artists are a very important part of our society because they make a great contribution to our values. The artist creates a value system that we all grow up on, whether we know it or not.

Roy DeCarava

The artist creates the material that we look back upon as part of history.

Roy DeCarava

But if it's true it's beautiful. Truth is beautiful. And so my whole work is about what amounts to a reverence for life itself.

Roy DeCarava

For me, photography must be visual, rather than intellectual and ideological.

Roy DeCarava

A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being.

Roy DeCarava

Seeing your work on the wall is like the ultimate thing that can happen.

Roy DeCarava

I don't really think that the technique really determines the veracity of the image. It's what the image does to the viewer that determines whether it's right or wrong.

Roy DeCarava

You should be able to look at me and see my work. You should be able to look at my work and see me.

Roy DeCarava

The artist is a kind of a seer and by nature he is optimistic because he believes in the future.

Roy DeCarava

My photographs are subjective and personal-they’r e intended to be accessible, to relate to people’s lives... People-their well-being and survival-are the crux of what’s important to me.

Roy DeCarava

It's the not the subject that interests me as much as my perception of the subject.

Roy DeCarava

There were no black images of dignity, no images of beautiful black people. There was this big hole. I tried to fill it.

Roy DeCarava