Trained as a painter, Mr. DeCarava relied on ambient light, infusing his images with shadows and shades of gray and black - a style that invited the viewer to look closer.

"He photographed for himself, and ultimately produced a body of work that enshrined the social contradictions of the '50s, the explosion of improvisational jazz music in the '60s, the struggle for social equity, the bold-faced stridency of the '70s and '80s, only to turn to even more contemplative realities during the later years of his life," his wife, art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, said in a statement.

"His contribution to American photography and culture is manifold," she said.

Using a 35mm camera, he chronicled black Americans doing ordinary things: a family watching the Harlem River; a couple dancing in their kitchen; a girl standing on a desolate street in a white graduation dress.

Mr. DeCarava worked at a time of enormous creative energy in Harlem, whose many residents included prominent writers, artists, and musicians. He spent years capturing candid shots of Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, and other jazz musicians - many taken in smoke-filled nightclubs.

The Sound I Saw, published in 2001 and reprinted in 2003, is a collection of his jazz photography.

In 1951, he became the first black photographer to win the Guggenheim Fellowship in the arts.

In his scholarship application, he wrote: "I want to show the strength, the wisdom, the dignity of the Negro people. Not the famous and the well known, but the unknown and the unnamed, thus revealing the roots from which spring the greatness of all human beings. . . . I do not want a documentary or sociological statement, I want a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret."

In 1955, he collaborated with poet Langston Hughes on a best-selling pictorial narrative on 20th-century African American life, The Sweet Flypaper of Life.

See some DeCarava works via http://

go.philly.com/decarava