Exerpted with permission from:
Refractions and Reflections ©Sherry Turner 2001 (volume in preparation)

Is a sound to be seen? Another's heart known? Can an image be a life? Is intelligence feeling? Will it be envisioned? Can we puzzle at the boundaries of the unknowable as the known? Do time and light bend? Is it possible to experience the magnificent cosmic river of self and life as an ordained and comprehensible moment? Such questions and their answers are contained in the ruminative flow of Roy DeCarava's new book The Sound I Saw which--as a Phaidon Press publishing discovery in 2001 of a book first written in 1962--is bound to rewrite photographic history.

Compiled of 196 images that are sequenced into a compelling non-narrative suite, not unlike a sequence of musical phrases in a song or a sweep of bay windows giving vantage points onto particular places that reach toward uncharted territory, the work consistently transforms ordinary experience by the implication of extraordinary insight. There is not a more perfect comprehension between the seen and the felt, between exterior and interior realities in the recent art history of American photographic book publishing.

DeCarava states: "The idea came to me that two photographs I made of a musician were exactly 1/15 of a second apart-- yet could be conceived as being 15 minutes apart, or 15 months or even 15 years--and that between these two moments, an open possibility of life lay."

Sequencing images between these two visual pillars, he coaxes the emergence of a deft architectonic structure to support his pictorial flow. Yet the book establishes and then confounds a cinematic feeling by the avoidance of a specific narrative. Ultimately, it provokes an integration of word and image far looser but more intimately synchronic than any other book attempting the synthesis. And what words! A certain surprise of the publication is the power, in equal measure, of poetics in picture and word.

The Sound I Saw is the first photographic book to attempt a multidimensional synthesis of sight and sound by exploring the lives of musicians, the internal exigencies of visual and literary art and the capturing, to momentarily hold aloft, the elusive muse, music itself, through a consideration of life itself. It is in this regard, the earliest presentation of the artist's thinking about the creative process, independently produced without editorial intervention, and it represents the purest form of artistic expression for this photographer.

DeCarava's almost two decades of work allows the photographer, though not a musician himself, to achieve the status of an insider in that world while bringing another, visual , expertise to the process. The result is a privileged view of an intense and hermetic profession by a prescient observer during a period when jazz music was itself in one of the most formative, exploratory and revolutionary phases of modernism.

Unlike other visual essays concerned with jazz, the book does not confine itself to a photographic or descriptive approach to one particular subject but establishes a personal standard of what may be referred to as 'artistic insight' in the photographic process. It represents a new level, whether considered historically for the early 1960s or as relevant to the photographer's responsibility today, in the relationship between photographer and his theme.

The tome essentially breaks the confines of the picture/word genre and suggests another startling achievement: a book that does not require readers and images that do not require an audience. This apparent contradiction arises because the true text of the book establishes itself somewhere between the images and the words; and the pictures depict people or things who quietly go about the mysterious processes of life in a deft illusion so tranquil, that it often renders them seemingly independent of our observation or presence.

If the book engages the reader on a deep, reflective level, it does so by coalescing an arena of complex and sophisticated non-verbal communication rarely addressed by contemporary intellectual efforts or proposed by current theoretical paradigms. It is an achievement no less surprising for the time of its initial formulation as well as for the ease and deceptive simplicity of its formal accomplishment. The flow of images in the book, established through an astute, intuitive sequencing process, never imposes a grand organizational schema. Nevertheless, it deftly orders the visual experience and creates a clarity of purpose through an open, emotionally discursive process.

The book substantially rewrites the history of image/ word publications and opens the possibility for a vigorous new approach to resolving inherent conflicts between our visual and intellectual worlds, between what is felt and what is known. If such may be experienced or proposed by most as a struggle, the author modestly alludes in his introduction of the book to only something intended "for the heart and for the mind." The book defines the power of an individual image as its capacity to portend such emotional and intellectual force and clearly celebrates significance over documentation; openly finds in dense extracts of reality, subtle beauty and revelatory truths.

If there is a religious experience embedded in this process, it is on the order of an individual's spiritual journey to the light (which the photographer so often grounds in the opalescent ambiguity of penetrable darkness). The artist alerts us that there is a deep contradiction in the manner in which we conduct our lives and that, paradoxically, contemplating this seemingly irresolvable difference between what we (think) we see and what we (think) we know is at the crux of the esthetic experience, a personal journey that ultimately illuminates the passage back from chaos to meaning in the conduct of a life.

The significance of this publication will be assessed in as many long years to come as were required for it to be published, and certainly assessments will relate to "who and what you are." But it will also come as contemporary scholarship gleans more about the complexities and profundities of the creative visual process and this book will claim a place as one of the significant monuments along that road.

Sherry Turner, art historian and author, is the director of the DeCarava Archives.