Dancers, New York

Photographer Roy DeCarava employed darkness in his photographs both to depict African American skin and to encourage deeper and more sustained looking. In this photograph, taken at a dance hall on 110th Street in Harlem, the darkness makes it take a moment to distinguish the silhouettes of the two dancers in the foreground, and a moment longer to recognize in their frozen postures the gestures of minstrelsy. DeCarava later reflected: “Their figures remind me so much of the real-life experiences of blacks in their need to put themselves in an awkward position before the man, for the man; to demean themselves in order to survive. And yet, there is something in these figures . . . that is very creative, that is very real and very black in the finest sense of the word.”