The Sound He Saw
Roy DeCarava was one of few photographers who documented life in Harlem in the second half of the 20th century. His photographs of jazz musicians like Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong performing onstage were taken with the same immediacy as those of an average commuter leaving the subway in Harlem. Born in 1919, he was raised by his mother in Harlem and encouraged by a teacher to pursue art. He attended an art school funded by the Works Progress Administration, where he met the renowned African-American poet, Langston Hughes. In 1952 he became the first African-American photographer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship. He later teamed up with Hughes to publish The Sweet Flypaper of Life, which featured DeCarava’s photographs along with a poem from the perspective of a woman living in Harlem, written by Hughes.
I had the chance to meet Roy DeCarava while I was working for an art book publisher, who had heard rumours of the photographer’s legendary unpublished book, The Sound I Saw. One night we visited him in his house in Brooklyn, where, after dinner, he heaved an old, dusty suitcase onto the dinner table and opened it to reveal a massive, black leather-bound book. Inside the book, DeCarava had pasted his own prints, featuring jazz musicians performing and relaxing backstage, as well as everyday street scenes, alongside cutout strips of a poem he’d written to accompany the photographs. He had hand-stitched the binding of the book himself. DeCarava had kept the book in storage for nearly 30 years, due in part to his skepticism of curators and publishers who had promised to promote his work throughout the years. Unfortunately this also meant that his work didn’t received the exposure it deserved. In 2001, a facsimile of DeCarava’s original hand-bound book was published by Phaidon Press, under DeCarava’s original title, The Sound I Saw. DeCarava died last Tuesday, 27 October 2009.
A complete obituary is here
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