THE SOUNDS HE SAW
MUCH LIKE A LOST JAZZ RECORDING, master photographer Roy DeCarava’s one-of-a-kind fine art book the sound i saw: improvisations on a jazz theme sat unpublished for decades. It existed solely as a maquette—essentially a mockup or prototype, crafted painstakingly by hand in 1960, shut inside a worn leather case and left to languish in a closet after multiple rejections from publishers. But thanks to the tireless efforts of DeCarava’s widow, the art historian Sherry Tucker DeCarava, the sound i saw is finally available in a majestic bound volume from First Print Press and David Zwirner Books, just in time for what would have been DeCarava’s 100th birthday.
DeCarava (pronounced ) got his start in the late 1940s and developed an aesthetic of his own, with “infinite silver tonalities” and “gorgeous grays” that went beyond. (One of DeCarava’s most famous images, however—the cover of Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ —is in color.) His work can be suggestively out of focus, abstract in its way, even as it depicts human subjects as concrete as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, Quincy Jones, Thelonious Monk, Elvin Jones, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and Ornette Coleman, among others.
