PERCORSI • BORDERS OF THE VISIBLE C. BLINDER • Looking for Harlem 193 CoSMo Comparative Studies in Modernism n. 13 (Fall) • 2018 CAROLINE BLINDER LOOKING FOR HARLEM The Absent Narrator in Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’ Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) ABSTRACT: Despite its decidedly humanist angle, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) also positions itself in a no-man’s land, not simply because it is seen through the eyes of a woman but because it occupies a space where the compelling narration by the fictitious character of Sister Mary and the equally compelling photographs by DeCarava still rest uneasily—literally and at times photographically—within the wider landscape of Harlem. As such, this collaborative photo-text on the daily life of Harlem is a much more subtle and complex project than it first appears. Even though the project was enabled by Hughes’s reputation as a prominent writer of African American life, the actual approach allows for something ‘subversive’ to take place in the interaction between the text and the photographs accompanying it. This examination looks at how The Sweet Flypaper of Life—vastly underrated in studies of American photography— pushed beyond previous photographic studies of Harlem and as such, beyond the boundaries set by photo-textual collaborations in general. KEYWORDS: Harlem, African American Studies, Documentary Studies, American Photography, Langston Hughes, Roy DeCarava, 20th century American Studies. Looking at a few sequences in The Sweet Flypaper of Life from 1955, a photo-textual collaboration by the writer Langston Hughes and the photographer Roy DeCarava, it becomes clear just how much the documentary impetus of post-war America had changed by the 1950s. Beginning with the cover of the book itself, a cropped photograph of a child’s face with the title superimposed on top of it and underneath the very first paragraph of the narrative itself, it dispenses with the usual introductory material in order to move seamlessly from the cover to the story inside. Consisting of 140 photographs in black and white of varying format with a running commentary below and around it, The Sweet Flypaper of Life therefore looks as much like an extended magazine exposé from the period as a collaboration between two artists. Compared to previous documentary studies of Harlem from the 1930s and 40s Roy Decarava’s photographs of Harlem are nonetheless more lyrical than informative, rendering an intimate vision of a people usually seen as