Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw

Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw is the pictorial equivalent of jazz. Here the visionary photographer turns his gaze on legendary jazz icons John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman, among many others.

“This is a book about people, about jazz, and about things. The work between its covers tries to present images for the head and for the heart and, like its subject matter, is particular, subjective, and individual,” writes DeCarava. A master of poetic contemplation and of sensual tonalities in black and white, DeCarava is, above all, a photographer of people. A member of the post–World War II generation that sought a new modernist vocabulary, he was first recognized for his innovative images of life in Harlem (the subject of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his 1955 collaboration with poet Langston Hughes) and extraordinary portraits of jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday. It is these two themes—New York and jazz—interwoven and inseparable, that are the ostensible subject of the sound i saw. However, the seemingly casual yet deeply felt compositions and the rich, gradient tones of DeCarava’s photographs stir emotions that resonate far beyond one neighborhood and one era.

Conceived, designed, written, and made as an artist maquette by DeCarava in the early 1960s, the sound i saw went unpublished for almost half a century until it was printed by Phaidon in 2001. At its core is a visual and philosophical journey to plumb the meaning of a creative life. The artist’s intention in proposing a complex relationship between vision and music moves his comprehensive, decade-long reflection to the status of a magnum opus. This new edition, co-published by First Print Press and David Zwirner Books, includes new scholarship by Radiclani Clytus, and reflections by Sherry Turner DeCarava.