The Sound I Saw

by Roy DeCarava

"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. It represents pictures and words from one head and one heart."

Roy DeCarava

In the early 1960s, photographer Roy DeCarava conceived, designed and wrote a handcrafted book titled The Sound I Saw which represented a culmination of over a decade of his visual thinking and exploration. Until now this volume has existed largely as a legend among the cognoscenti of the photography world. Finally this masterwork of photography is available and we are able to gain greater access into the world of Roy DeCarava, an American photographer of our time.

Themes of life and music, representing two overarching motifs of the book are interwoven with urban experiences and become inseparable as the subject of The Sound I Saw. DeCarava was first recognized for his photographs about people in New York, his early work in Harlem and portrayals of musicians like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Quincy Jones, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane, among others. These individuals, both famous and anonymous, emerge from the deep, dark yet penetrable tones of DeCarava's black and white prints and stir emotions that resonate beyond the specifics of a particular moment or place.

The Sound I Saw, presented in a stream of 196 images interspersed with DeCarava's own poetry, creates a visual equivalent of jazz music. In a manner that is at once unflinching and gentle, DeCarava's photographs give an intimate voice to an entire world of thoughts and experiences. The Sound I Saw is, in its form and content, an instant classic: a treasured volume for photography laymen and scholars alike, a visual essay for those who care about music and an artist's personal testament to enduring values.

About Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava began his career as a painter and turned to photography in the late 1940s. By 1952, he had fully embraced the new medium and produced a body of work for which he became the first Afro-American photographer to be awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Mr. DeCarava's early work was included at the Museum of Modern Art in Edward Steichen's seminal 1950 exhibit, The Family of Man. DeCarava subsequently published with Langston Hughes an award-winning pictorial fiction entitled The Sweet Flypaper of Life. His first major one-man exhibition was held at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1969 and was followed with a catalogue and retrospective mounted in 1975 by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. The Friends of Photography (San Francisco) issued a monograph of his work in 1981 with an award winning text by art historian Sherry Turner, a frequent collaborator. During the next decade, the work was seen in retrospectives at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (1987), the Photographer's Gallery, London (1988), the Moderna Museet Fotografiska, Sweden (1988), as well as in an exhibition sponsored by the City of Paris, Pavilion des Arts (1988). The Museum of Modern Art (New York) mounted in 1996 a major nine-city exhibition that toured the United States through 1999 and was accompanied by publication of a monograph Roy DeCarava, A Retrospective.

Born in New York City in 1919, Mr. DeCarava was educated in the city's public schools. Following a brief period of work on the W.P.A. art project, he entered The Cooper Union Institute where he studied painting, architecture and sculpture; later, he enrolled in the Harlem Art Center and the George Washington Carver Art School. While engaging his artistic work, Mr. DeCarava continued for twenty years as a freelance editorial photographer for major magazines and for Columbia, Prestige, ABC Paramount, and Atlantic records. In the1970s, he began his academic career as Professor of Art at The Cooper Union.

He has been awarded honorary degrees from Rhode Island School of Design, the Maryland Institute of Art, Wesleyan University, The New School for Social Research, Parsons School of Design and the Art Institute of Boston. He is a recipient of the Century Award in Photography from the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the National Arts Club and the Master of Photography Award from the International Center of Photography. Mr. DeCarava has taught at Hunter College since the 1970s where he is Distinguished Professor of Art. He resides in New York City.