The Sweet Flypaper of Life"DeCarava had received a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph life in Harlem in 1953. After being turned down by several publishers, he embarked on a collaboration with the writer Langston Hughes, the leading black writer and a prime mover in the 'Second Harem Renaissance'. Sweet Flypaper was published not as an out-and-out social documentary book, but with DeCarava's 'real life' images illustrating a fictional text by Hughes about life in Harlem. The most significant feature of The Sweet Flypaper of Life (apart from its great title) is not its indeterminate status as fact, fiction, or even faction' but that a leading mainstream publisher took the chance of publishing a view of a minority community from the 'nside' The fictional format enables DeCarava and Hughes to be positive, without the necessity to make claims for the all-inclusiveness of their view."--The Photobook : A History Volume I / Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. London : Phaidon, 2004. |
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