By Holly Stuart Hughes and Daryl Lang

Roy DeCarava, the Harlem-born photographer known for more than half a century’s worth of revealing social documentary photography, has died at age 89.

DeCarava died Tuesday in New York City, according to the Los Angeles Times, which cited his daughter, Wendy DeCarava. DeCarava’s wife, Sherry Turner DeCarava, announced his death Wednesday. A cause of death was not available.

DeCarava was an advocate for young African-American photographers and fought for a more serious portrayal of blacks in art, as opposed to caricatures and stereotypes.

Born in 1919, DeCarava attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York from 1938 to 1940. He told PDN in a 1996 interview, "I was the only black student at Cooper Union. It was lonely." After a stint in the Army, he studied painting and drawing at George Washington Carver Art School.

He worked as a commercial painter and silk-screener for several years . He began taking photos of the life he saw around him in order to gather material for his sketches.

In 1950, a small show of his photos held at a friend's gallery caught the eye of Edward Steichen, then head of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Steichen bought three of DeCarava's prints, which he exhibited in the landmark "Family of Man" exhibition in 1955.

In 1952, DeCarava became the first African-American photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Fellowship changed the way he viewed his work. Before then, he told PDN, "My main concern was that I wasn't photographing black people as much as I was photographing people." After applying for the Fellowship, he realized, "I was filling a void that I felt a responsibility to fill because nobody was doing it. So that whereas before I was interested in the purely creative aspects of images, now there was a social dynamic which I had not paid too much attention to."

With his Guggenheim Fellowship, he produced 2,000 photos of daily life in Harlem. Many of them appeared in his first book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a collaboration with poet Langston Hughes published in 1955.

As a freelance commercial photographer, he shot for magazines and ad agencies, and shot record covers and TV stills, and became a contract photographer for Sports Illustrated for eight years. However, assignments were "crumbs falling off a table," he told PDN. "The only time it opened uo was during the civil rights struggle."

In 1963, he co-founded Kamoinge, an association which offered workshops and critiques to  African American photographers.

"He influenced and guided us all," says photographer Anthony Barboza, the current director of Kamoinge. Barboza says DeCarava's work examined "the ordinary, subtle moment in life," particularly in the lives of African-Americans. "He was not about showing our poverty, but about showing the beauty within us as a people."

Fellow Kamoinge member Herbert Randall, who met DeCarava in 1963, says he was inspired to become a photographer after seeing The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Before DeCarava, Randall says, "Black people were portrayed as subservient. To Roy, they were human beings."

In 1975, DeCarava began teaching at New York's Hunter College, and was named Distinguished Professor of Art in 1988.

In 1996, DeCarava was the subject of a career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1998, the International Center of Photography honored him with the Infinity Award for Master of Photography. The Sound I Saw, a collection of his portraits of jazz artists, was published by Phaidon in 2000.