The people in these photographs had no walls up. They just accepted me and permitted me to take
their photographs without any self-consciousness.” —Roy DeCarava The Sweet Flypaper of Life is
a poem” about ordinary people about teenagers around a jukebox about children at an open fire
hydrant about riding the subway alone at night about picket lines and artist work spaces.
This renowned life-affirming collaboration between artist Roy DeCarava and writer Langston
Hughes honors in words and pictures what the authors saw knew and felt deeply about life in
their city. Hughes’s heart-warming description of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s is
seen through the eyes of one grandmother Sister Mary Bradley. As she guides the reader through
the lives of those around her we imagine the babies born families in struggle children yet
flourishing. We experience the sights and sounds of Harlem as seen through her learned and
worldly eyes expressed here through Hughes’s poetic prose. As she states I done got my feet
caught in the sweet flypaper of life and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.” DeCarava’s
photographs lay open a world of sense and feeling that begins with his perception and vision.
The ruminations go beyond the limit of simple observation and contend with deeper meanings to
reveal these individuals as subjects worthy of art. While Hughes states We’ve had so many books
about how bad life is maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is ” the photographs
bring us back to this lively dialogue and a complex reality to a resolution that stands with
the optimism of the photographic medium and the certainty of DeCarava’s artistic moment. In
1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Fellowship. The one-year grant enabled DeCarava to focus full time on the photography
he had been creating since the mid-1940s and to complete a project that would eventually result
in The Sweet Flypaper of Life a moving photo-poetic work in the urban setting of Harlem.
DeCarava compiled a set of images from which Hughes chose 141 and adeptly supplied a fictive
narration reflecting on life in that city-within-a-city. First published in 1955 the book
widely considered a classic of photographic visual literature was reprinted by public demand
several times. This fourth printing the Heritage Edition is the first authorized
English-language edition since 1983 and includes an afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava tracing
the history and ongoing importance of this book.
