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# Roy DeCarava on Charlie Rose
- URL: https://www.grainpress.com/roy-decarava-on-charlie-rose/
- Published: 2026-09-05T15:26:34.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T15:26:34.000Z
- Description: A thirteen-minute television interview from 1996. We keep going back to what DeCarava says about sharpness, about working in the dark, and about the one subject he never managed to photograph.
- Author: Grainpress Editors
- Tags: HAVE A LOOK, #fmt-brief

Roy DeCarava sat with Charlie Rose on March 21, 1996, midway through *Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective* at the Museum of Modern Art — about two hundred prints, nearly fifty years of work, with a book of the same title from the museum. The segment runs about thirteen minutes, and the [Charlie Rose site carries it with a full transcript](https://charlierose.com/videos/381?ref=grainpress.com).

He had trained as a painter and turned to photography in the late 1940s. Painting, he says, "secluded me, excluded me from the world." He is precise about what draws him instead: "it's not the subject that interests me as much as my perception of the subject."

Rose asks what technical virtuosity a great photographer needs. DeCarava says most photographers lean on it heavily. He works from desire, and the competence arrives out of "fighting with... the desire to make this thing work." His frames come out fuzzy sometimes, or grainy. Rose asks whether that is a stylistic device. It is not. Given a picture with great feeling that is slightly soft, DeCarava says, you can insist that it has to be sharp, or you can say "God, this is a great picture," and use it. He uses it.

The rest of the segment covers the Harlem pictures where he says he was not chronicling anything, only "using the subject as a vehicle for my perceptions," and the street introduction to Langston Hughes that produced *The Sweet Flypaper of Life*.

His own site carries a longer piece: a [twenty-minute tribute video](https://decarava.org/tribute-1?ref=grainpress.com) of clips and images from the Sherry and Roy DeCarava Archives, posted in 2011.