Hallway is part of an extended series that Roy DeCarava created during a yearlong Guggenheim Fellowship, the first awarded to an African American photographer. One of his most poetic pictures, Hallway was also one of DeCarava’s most personal. He told the San Francisco journalist Sam Whiting, “It was all the hallways I grew up in. They were poor, poor tenements, badly lit, narrow and confining. Hallways that had something to do with the economics of building for poor people.”