Over a career that spanned nearly six decades, DeCarava came to be known as a founder in the field of black and white fine art photography, advocating for an approach to the medium based on the core value of an individual, subjective creative sensibility, which was separate and distinct from the "social documentary" style of many predecessors.

Resisting explicit politicization, DeCarava used photography to counter what he described as “black people...not being portrayed in a serious and artistic way.”[2] DeCavara was drafted in the Army in 1942, where he would first be sent to Virginia, and then stationed in Fort Claiborne, Louisiana, in the Jim Crow South.

[9] Gradually, DeCarava became known for his dedication to the field of visual art and for his own work within it, including many distinctive black and white, silver gelatin photographs of great American musicians.

[14] From 1955 to 1957, at his own expense, he established and supported A Photographer's Gallery in his apartment in a brownstone block at 48 West 85th Street,[1] New York, in which was shown artwork by the great names of American photography of the period.

In 1963, he co-founded and became the first director of the Kamoinge Workshop, a Harlem-Based collective that supported the work of black photographers through exhibitions, public programs, group critiques, and published portfolios.

He has pointed out over and over that despite his “reputation as a documentar[y] photographer, … I really never was,” and reiterated his steadfastly modernist concern to achieve “a creative expression,” rather than a “documentary or sociological statement.”[19] While DeCarava never worked in the field of cinema himself, he grew up in the era of black-and-white filmmaking and, in an interview much later in his career, noted, “I think I absorbed the visual aesthetic of black-and-white films, so that when I started taking pictures, it was natural.” [20] His largest work is Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective, over 200 black and white photos spanning the late 1940s to the 1990s.

DeCarava wrote ”in spite of poverty, you see people with dignity and a certain quality that contrasts with where they live and what they’re doing.”[21] His Guggenheim fellowship helped fund the project while he spent a full year shooting the photographs for the book.