The Sweet Flypaper of Life (hardcover)

“The Sweet Flypaper of Life remains a lauded title that conveys Harlem as a microcosm within the larger city.” — Dani Issler ? The Brooklyn Rail

“A breakthrough in photo books.” — Suzanne Charlé ? nycwoman

“The Sweet Flypaper of Life is an incredible wonder that is so compact you can almost cradle it in your palm. A sense of humanity permeates the black-and-white photographs…And DeCarava’s narrow range of deep tones breathes beautiful life into the black faces of the young and old.” — Nicole Herrington ? The New York Times

“It is a book, then, that continues to fascinate, even more so, perhaps, in the current political climate. Its timely reissue will hopefully alert a new generation to a still undervalued master of intimate observation and his singular collaboration with a writer who instinctively understood his radical vision.” — Sean O’Hagan ? The Guardian

“A mixture of the warm and stark, the tender and the slightly terrifying- in short, very like life itself.” — Staff ? The Village Voice

“The subtle, the almost exquisite interplay of text and photographs.” — Staff ? Image Journal

“As the narrative progresses, the images and words dance together in a way that still surprises… what emerges is an intimate portrait of a close-knit community on the point of great change.” — Sean O’Hagan ? The Guardian

“Astonishing verisimilitude.” — Staff ? The New York Times

“The sensitivity of the photographs and the excellent blending of the pictures with the text… Bravo!” — Henri Cartier Bresson

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) was a poet, novelist, playwright, and social activist. Known worldwide as a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes’s work has been significant in introducing black history and culture into the corpus of American cultural history as well as inspiring with his humanistic concerns, writers in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and South America. While living in Harlem, Hughes maintained close relationships with other writers working in and around the city—Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman were all considered friends and they would frequently gather to discuss politics, writing, and literature. Together, this close group of writers was instrumental in giving voice to the communities that would not accept persecution and marginalization. Hughes’s dispatches for the New York newspapers raised quotidian reportage to an art, filing moving descriptions of the famed Harlem Brigade who were martyred during the Spanish Civil War. Later in his life Hughes turned toward collaboration, working with the German composer Kurt Weill on the 1947 opera Street Scene, with jazz musicians including Charles Mingus and with the photographer Roy DeCarava on The Sweet Flypaper of Life.

Sherry Turner DeCarava is an art historian, curator, and independent scholar in the fields of traditional arts and contemporary American photography. She has taught or lectured extensively at universities and museums, including Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), Brooklyn Museum, and Rockefeller University. Serving as the executive director, the principal focus of her professional career has been the development of The DeCarava Archives, which supports exhibition and scholarly research projects related to the work of her late husband Roy DeCarava. She is the author of two definitive texts on his photography, including that in Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1996) and in Roy DeCarava: Photographs, a monograph published by the Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Trust (1981). Awarded the Prix de la Photographie by Les Rencontres de la Photographie, the Arles Center for Culture, in its annual survey of international photography, her 1981 text was lauded as the best photo/text collaboration of the year. In 2014 she initiated First Print Press, beginning a process to republish classic Roy DeCarava books, while bringing new photographic projects into print.