Roy DeCarava, whose work etched Harlem life one smoky still shot at a time, died on Oct. 27 at 89. His work, breaking with tradition, paved a way for black photographers in America. The tributes began immediately.

“He creates poems with a camera,” wrote Martin Parsekian.

Malaika Adero: “He made pictures moving. Dark and light a rainbow of humanity.”

Tina Psoinos: “The world and the arts have lost a true master.”

Jason Williams: “Roy is, hands down, my favorite photographer of all time.”

These eulogies flowed on A Devotion to Roy DeCarava, an online commemoration to the Harlem native whose 60-year career yielded some of the most iconic photographs in African-American history. His death was announced by his wife, Sherry Turner DeCarava, who did not state the cause. It prompted a stream of passionate rememberences from those who admired his art and honored what it meant. DeCarava’s best-known photos showed daily life in Harlem or portrayed jazz legends like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday.

Born December 9, 1919, DeCarava studied painting at Cooper Union, but gravitated to photography in the late 1940s. He was the first black photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, which helped fund his Harlem-centric photos for the acclaimed 1955 book, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” co-authored by poet Langston Hughes. After a decade of freelancing, DeCarava had his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Following a brief stint at Sports Illustrated, he taught at Hunter College, where he won the National Medal of Arts in 2006.

The Museum of Modern Art organized a DeCarava retrospective in 1996. “No photographer black or white before him had really shown ordinary domestic life so perceptively and tenderly, so persuasively,” Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography told the New York Times.

“Roy had no match,” Psoinos, DeCarava’s student in the 1980s, said in an interview. “To me he is the synonym of fine art photography.” Now an interior designer and photographer in Manhattan, Psoinos called her experience with DeCarava life-altering.

“He taught me how to shoot without using my head but my heart,” she said. “He deeply influenced my art style and career choices and guided me in acquiring the confidence to fight for what is important to me.”

Dawoud Bey, also a Guggenheim Fellow with close ties to Harlem, recalled DeCarava’s unflinching artistic criticism, yet warm concern for young photographers under his tutelage. “I am still smarting (but oh so much wiser) from the first critique he gave me some thirty-odd years ago,” Bey wrote on his personal website. Student accounts of their review sessions with DeCarava “had the humorously perverse and earnest quality of trying to outdo each other over who had gotten their ass kicked the hardest by Roy.”

Even those who barely knew him recalled their brief encounters with DeCarava with reverence. “I found him extremely warm and giving,” says Bill Schwab, a Detroit photographer who met DeCarava only once.

Historians laud DeCarava for his pioneering role in evocatively depicting African-American life. The 1949 photo, called Graduation, for example, captures a young black woman in a formal gown passing through a garbage-littered Harlem street. Full of emotion, the photo embodies the intimacy and quiet activism of DeCarava’s art.

“He had a capacity for not making the nooks and crannies of poverty the subject of his work,” said Gregory Baggett, a historian at Columbia University. “Harlem was a means to a bigger picture of human interaction.”

Born in an America where blacks couldn’t share water fountains with whites, but dying in one that elected a black president, DeCarava played his own part in the civil rights saga of the past 60 years. He was an active member of the Committee to End Discrimination Against Black Photographers and engaged in protests against Life magazine’s discriminatory hiring practices in the ’60s. But his photography itself broke down barriers.

“His work really had to do with social equality and human rights,” Baggett explained. “All human beings have a capability to be rendered as a signifier of beauty, and I think that’s what Roy did.”