The Sound I Saw: Improvisation on a Jazz Theme

Conceived, designed, written, and hand-assembled as a prototype by master photographer Roy DeCarava in the early 1960s, The Sound I Saw went unpublished for 40 years, becoming something of a legend among the cognoscenti of the photography world, until it was finally printed in 2003. The stream of 196 large black and white images interspersed with DeCarava’s own evocative poetry is his printed equivalent of jazz music. Largely unpublished, the lifelong New Yorker was first recognized for his images of daily life in Harlem—the subject of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his 1955 collaboration with Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes—and portraits of musicians like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. It is these two themes—Harlem and jazz—that are the ostensible subject of the book, though the deceptively casual compositions and the deep, rich tones of DeCarava’s photographs resonate far beyond one neighborhood and one era. The photographs are reproduced here as tritones for maximum fidelity to the original prints. paperbound, as new as issued, prev.

mint copy in dj over boards as issued.

$ 175.00