By Henrik Krogius

A photographer, resident in Bedford-Stuyvesant but associated especially with Harlem, died last week. He was not as well known as he should have been, for he was one of the very best. Roy DeCarava recorded people and life in Harlem with a sensitivity and a command of the medium that placed him among the masters.

DeCarava, 89 at his death, had achieved the title of distinguished professor of art at Hunter College, and can’t be said to have wasted away into obscurity. Even so, he did not get quite the recognition he was due. Inexplicably he was not included in the Metropolitan Museum’s giant exhibition, “Harlem on My Mind,� presented under Thomas Hoving’s direction in 1969, which heavily featured group portraiture by James VanDerZee, valuable as documentation but not nearly the artistic equal of DeCarava’s work. An obituary in last Thursday’s New York Times mentioned that DeCarava was very particular about where and how his photographs were displayed, also that he incurred opposition from Gordon Parks, the influential black Life magazine photographer, over his campaign to get more representation for other black photographers.

That the man with the kindly face pictured with the Times obituary might have been a contentious character seems strange. His photography is suffused with sympathy for his subjects. Beyond that, in a medium that depends on light, where to capture features and feelings in dark-skinned faces is a challenge, DeCarava succeeded without the aid of flash or other strong illumination. He was able to extract variations from shadings of black and near-black, in photographs often too subtly gradated for effective newspaper reproduction. After winning a Guggenheim fellowship in 1952, DeCarava went on to shoot in Harlem, getting a few of his pictures into the landmark Museum of Modern Art “Family of Man� show in 1955, the same year that he produced the charming book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, in which his images were linked together in a running narrative by the poet Langston Hughes, in the form of an imagined Harlem grandmother talking about her kin and neighbors. At a time when Harlem was regarded by the white world as a hopeless and dangerous slum, DeCarava’s work was a poignant reminder that it was a place where life went on, filled with joys as well as pain.

Another death reported last week was that of Lawrence Halprin, 93, the Brooklyn-born landscape architect who brought a new sense of what “landscape� can mean in an urban setting. Halprin, whose career was spent mainly in California, broadened the definition from one referring to trees, lawns, flowers and water to encompass also walls, rocks and substances like concrete. At the same time he was not averse to trees, planting half a million of them in the Sea Ranch development he planned for Sonoma County, CA. Halprin was as concerned with how people would move through a space as with how that space looked. Younger landscape architects, including no doubt Brooklyn Bridge Park designer Michael Van Valkenburgh, recognize Halprin as someone who showed the way to new directions in their field.

Perhaps Halprin’s most conspicuous achievement is the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC, where rock walls and roughly square-cut stones create a series of outdoor rooms and passages. As it happens, that project was a source of conflict between him and the sculptor chosen to create the major figures of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, Neil Estern – who for several decades lived on Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights. Not a fan of Estern’s traditionalist sculpture, and perhaps not eager to have any sculpture dominate the memorial, Halprin tried to get Estern’s work reduced in size, but political support from the art commission and Congress ensured that Estern’s FDR would be of heroic scale.

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