Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw

Over the course of his more than six-decade career, New-York-born-and-based DeCarava produced a singular oeuvre of black-and-white photographs of modern life that combine formal acuity with an intimate and deeply human treatment of his subject matter. He worked with a handheld 35mm camera, which enabled him to move easily throughout the city, allowing him to recognize and identify with his subjects. This body of work juxtaposes images of everyday life in New York City—elegiac street corners, deliverymen working, children playing, riders waiting for the train—with images of jazz musicians.

Captured in Force, New York (1963) is a demonstration organized by Black residents of a Brooklyn neighborhood to protest the destruction of their homes in order to build an addition to the Downstate Medical Center. Those who refused to move were carried away by authorities. In an interview, Roy DeCarava stated that force, as it is in this photograph, is “the desire and the will by the majority of the people in the world to reach sunlight.” He saw this particular desire as stronger than the forces used against the people, especially Black people.  
 
"When citizens took to the streets en masse in the middle and late 1960s,” recalls art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, “[Roy] found another context through which he could envision people’s relationships to each other and the social imperatives of the times. He proposed both the individual and the communal responsibility of the artist, and his work, uncharacteristic of a mass movement, found power in a visual course, more serene than turbulent."

DeCarava was an aficionado of jazz, which he saw as a complementary art form to photography, and he often spent evenings haunting the city’s jazz clubs, always with camera in hand. Unlike most photographers of his day, DeCarava developed and printed his own images, cultivating over time a distinct and enduring visual language defined by a rich tonal range that approaches a painterly form of expression.

Many of the period’s jazz greats—such as Miles Davis, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane—are glimpsed both mid-set and off-stage in moments of repose, emphasizing their status not simply as musical icons, but as everyday people, workers trying to make a living. Taken together, DeCarava’s highly nuanced prints redirect the viewer’s attention to the sounds of life, offering—as he noted—“images for the head and for the heart.”

In 1983, DeCarava presented 125 photographs from the sound i saw at the Studio Museum in Harlem—the first public display of this body of work in any capacity. In the exhibition’s catalog, which featured only a small portion of the images, curator C. Daniel Dawson noted that, despite the presence of myriad jazz images, “DeCarava does not consider this the definitive photographic statement on jazz. It is to him a much more personal endeavor...It is an attempt to share with us his reflections on life and the process of living, using the jazz world and photography as his instruments.”