The story, ideas and incidents related are expressed as a stream of images as seen and felt through the eyes and mind of a jazz musician on a stage. Everything that happens takes place on stage, between sets, between smiles, or an interval between a man’s facial expressions. It is a moment, a lifetime or a set, the time that elapses is not important.
—Roy DeCarava, Preface to the sound i saw
the sound i saw: improvisation on a jazz theme can now be seen as Roy DeCarava’s crowning achievement as a photographer and African American artist—nearly half a century after he first conceived and planned it.1 This remarkable collection of 196 photographs weaves examples of urban photography dating from the beginning of the 1950s, when DeCarava became the first African American photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, together with informal portraits of jazz musicians, taken between 1956 and 1964, with the addition of an elliptical poetic text written by the photographer himself. Despite the originality of the concept, the sound i saw was considered too difficult and expensive to publish and was thus rendered invisible, unlike many comparable photographic books by DeCarava’s white contemporaries, until Phaidon finally stepped forward to publish it in 2001.
It is tempting to seek the reasons for this in the general invisibility imposed on black photographers and their work until very recently indeed. It is, in fact, only in the last decade or so that this absence has been adequately addressed, and then mainly by pioneering African American scholars such as Deborah Willis.2Their painstaking research and recovery of this hidden history may well have been a crucial factor in persuading institutions like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) finally to recognize black American photographers and bring them within the canon of American photography.
Peter Galassi, for example, as chief curator of MOMA’s Photography Department, has been a firm supporter of DeCarava’s work, initiating a belated but very welcome retrospective of the photographer’s work from the late 1940s onward in 1996; the show toured nationally until 1999 and a substantial monograph was published alongside it.3 This recognition is not before time, as DeCarava is now in his mid-eighties, and his work has been long overlooked. This neglect is all the more surprising given the early encouragement he received in the 1950s from Edward Steichen, the veteran photographer then working at MOMA, who recommended him for the Guggenheim, bought some of his work, and, in 1955, put four of his photographs into the immensely popular exhibition, The Family of Man, which toured around the world. That same year, not only did DeCarava open his own midtown gallery, where he exhibited work by Harry Callahan and many others, but his first publication won awards for Book of the Year from two New York newspapers.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life featured 140 of DeCarava’s photographs selected, sequenced, and stitched together with a continuous written text over a hundred pages.4His collaborator was another veteran artist, the Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, who realized how well these pictures might lend themselves to a folksy narrative of the kind he had perfected in his humorous “Simple” stories. Published by Simon & Schuster in an inexpensive pocket-sized format, the book was a great success, selling out its initial print run of 25,000. Gilbert Millstein, writing in the New York Times Book Review, immediately saw its potential for reaching across the color line, commenting that “it could accomplish a lot more about race relations than many pounds of committee reports.”5 Yet by 1970, Village Voice photography critic A. D. Coleman was berating the white arts establishment and white photographers in general for failing to recognize and support DeCarava. Not only did Coleman regard DeCarava as a fine photographer, but he also admired his practical activism on behalf of other black photographers, notably in founding the highly influential Kamoinge Workshop in Harlem.
So the time that has elapsed between Steichen and Galassi’s patronage and between conceiving the sound i saw and seeing it published seems quite significant in terms of the overall treatment of black photographers and black photography. Yet, despite the long wait, the extraordinary consistency of DeCarava’s output as a photographer and artist means that, within his oeuvre, this book seems fresh and undated. This consistency is evident in a number of ways. First, as DeCarava disarmingly admits, he took good pictures from the start. His technique is close to that of the humanist school of photographers from the mid-twentieth century, most obviously Henri Cartier-Bresson, but from the beginning he has maintained an expressive emphasis on shadows—shades of gray, he explains, rather than pure black—that lends his informal portraits of people an intimate, even spiritual quality.
His subject matter, too, has remained remarkably consistent since the days when he was encouraged to apply for support to the Guggenheim Foundation. The successful proposal, submitted in 1952, was in truth written largely on his behalf and couched in the post-war, humanistic, we-are-all-one terms that MOMA’s The Family of Man exhibition would soon exemplify, but it did reflect DeCarava’s enduring fascination with everyday life in the city—not with “the famous and the well known, but the unknown and the unnamed.” The statement also made it clear that, from the start, DeCarava saw himself as a creative artist rather than someone making “a documentary or sociological statement.”6
Above all, like his old friend Hughes, he has remained loyal to Harlem and much, if not most, of his photography can be read as a continuing essay on this quintessential site and center of African American urban culture.
Now that the sound i saw has finally emerged into the light, the first and fundamental question must be: why hook together photographs of jazz musicians and of everyday life and the street in the first place? Why did DeCarava not simply produce a photographic essay on, say, the classic John Coltrane Quartet, which he had photographed on numerous occasions and of which only tantalizing glimpses are given here? Why not, for that matter, produce a larger format sequel to The Sweet Flypaper of Life with his photographs organized this time around his own narrative text? Instead, he has juxtaposed and intermingled photographs of jazz and the everyday in a deliberate, orchestrated way.
Everything depicted here exists, DeCarava suggests, simultaneously, in the mind of a jazz musician, but what kind of relationship is suggested between jazz and photography in terms of shared form or content? Is a coherent argument being made and developed as the book proceeds? Phaidon’s editor claims that the sound i saw is “in its form and effect, the printed equivalent of jazz.” This is a considerable assertion and raises interesting issues about the nature of musical and photographic processes. Does DeCarava’s photographic method, in individual photographs and in the way they are sequenced, somehow absorb jazz technique or mimic jazz performance? Does he translate sound into something we can see?
In trying to answer some of these multiplying questions, I will first examine DeCarava’s particular aesthetic, which can be seen as both a distinctively black aesthetic and a profoundly inclusive one. His unflinching but caring eye is cast over the debris of the ghetto as well as the ecstasy of the jazz solo and it observes the cramped but welcoming dark of the metonymic Harlem hallway. Like William Faulkner, DeCarava is content to work his few acres; like Giorgio Morandi, he finds the sublime in mundane objects, whether ketchup bottles and dirty dishes on a bare table or the scratched surface of a double bass.
For a photographer who has—unfairly in his own view—been linked to the explosion of street photography in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly in New York, DeCarava is unusually reticent in his approach to all his subject matter, refusing to impose himself on the scene, whether it is set on a sidewalk, in a jazz club, or in a Harlem apartment.7 The humble and quotidian nature of the activities and objects he chooses to photograph makes his an exceptionally democratic eye among his peers, as if he were taking Cartier-Bresson at his word when the latter wrote, in 1952: “In photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject, the little human detail a leitmotiv.”8
There are good examples of this in the photographs included in the sound i saw. One, which is captioned elsewhere as Ketchup bottles, table and coat, has a classic simplicity achieved not through deliberate arrangement of these objects by the photographer but through his common practice of using only available light and allowing the shadows to thicken around them, so that they are subtly exalted.9 Space for DeCarava is never pure black and the darkness here is rich, inviting, and, as one reviewer has suggested, comforting, “as though he feels safe in it and connected by it to the fabric of social existence,” a quality she finds equally evident in his jazz portraits.10 That social existence is pointed to in these objects, a human presence filling the coat placed over the chair.
Another photograph—Coalman—clearly distinguishes DeCarava’s work from the intense but hurried approach of the so-called New York School of photographers. The movement here seems frozen, even posed. The stooped coal man has lifted the cover of a coalhole to sweep the remnants of a delivery into the chute. The man’s figure makes an awkward shape, the back bent right over and arm twisted. Behind him a pedestrian makes his way slowly up the sidewalk, round-shouldered himself, matching the weary body language of the coalman. On one level, this is a documentary statement, focusing in on hard labor and the dogged resilience that makes it possible. Yet the photograph itself is not weary; its dynamic play of line and structure draw the eye into a more imaginative vision. Sherry Turner DeCarava wrote in 1981 of her husband’s exploration of walls and perspective as physical relationships undergoing “transformations of form, substance and meaning that assume, through time, the shape of an intricate improvisatory music.”11
Dancers. 1956.
Copyright © Roy and Sherry DeCarava 2007.
As in a number of other photographs taken by DeCarava around this time, it seems to point toward the presence of lines and divisions framing and structuring the built environment. The bleak pattern of the square paving stones forms a grid that fills the foreground and stretches out into the distance, the two figures rhyming motifs. However, our attention is inevitably drawn down to what lies beneath the grid by the vertical lines of the coalman’s limbs and broom handle and by the direction of his effort. In uncovering part of the sidewalk, the worker has exposed dark material underground, revealing a black section beneath the white paving stones. In this way, DeCarava seems to transform a banal scene into a metaphor.
Metaphor appears again in Two women, mannequin’s hand, though here it appears by striking a dissonant chord in the composition. Characteristic of DeCarava’s style is the way he moves in very close to his subjects, especially his human subjects, but without confronting them, and boldly filling the frame. These two black women are photographed in close-up as they stand next to a shop window, out of which appears to emerge a white, claw-like hand. Although presumably in separated spaces divided by the window, the lack of reflection from the glass gives the illusion that the white hand, reaching down from its elevated but concealed location, is about to reach out to them and exert an uncanny power. The disembodied hand, in fact, appears twice in the other pictures DeCarava includes on the same spread, variations on an ominous theme.
Many of the jazz photographs in the book draw on these same formal and metaphorical concerns. The suggestion that photographs might assume the shape of improvisatory music is even more compelling in considering those photographs and sequences of photographs that do depict musicians and music being made.
DeCarava indicates in his preface that the sound i saw contains “story, ideas and incidents… expressed as a stream of images.” This is a deliberately constructed visual narrative in which photographs can be read in four ways: as single images; as complementary images sharing the same page or the same spread; as elements in a sequence of two or more spreads; and as ingredients in a total narrative—a whole photographic essay. When we try to read the sound i saw whole, as it were, we discover that there are sustained episodes or sequences within it that provide a visual narrative drive to the whole book. In this respect at least, the sound i saw should be set alongside those other photographic narrative tours de force: Walker Evans’s American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans.. 12 Evans’s use of “sequencing and discourse,” Jane Livingston argues, meant that “for the first time, photography could be consciously approached as a continuum or set of continuums within the single oeuvre.”13
The following analysis focuses on the ideas and incidents represented in the photographs and how they contribute to the construction of a story about jazz and everyday life, looking in turn at long sequences, short sequences, and individual photographs. However, it should be noted how the themes of this story are literally underwritten and sustained by DeCarava’s poetic text that wends its way, like an intermittent but persistent soloing instrument, through the whole book.
Unlike a conventional caption, this text does not set out to explain or illustrate the photographs but represents the photographer’s personal response to his own series of visual images. The information it provides is, therefore, suggestive rather than definitive. DeCarava himself has said:
If you look at the images and you read the words, the words don’t necessarily correspond to the picture—that’s the beauty of it. If they did, you’d stop. This way, you go through it, and then go through it again and again, and each time it has a different rhythm.14
To do full justice to this text would require another essay, but for the arguments being made here, it is perhaps sufficient to note that in form and content it aspires to the condition of jazz. On one level, it feels improvised—DeCarava has said as much about the process of writing it—and in this respect it falls into the contemporary category of literary homages to figures like Coltrane and Charlie Parker that Eric Porter notes in the Black Arts Movement, of which DeCarava was a significant figure, and of attempts made “to infuse writing with syncopated rhythms, tonal coloring, and an ethos of improvisation.”15
On the level of content, it focuses, if on occasion somewhat obscurely, on broad themes of alienation, poverty, drug taking, materialism, and authoritarianism set against a celebration of beauty and endurance. It is a critique of everyday life in the segregated world of black America, certainly, though it also nods in the direction of a growing countercultural post-war mood that affected white writers and photographers as much as black. The text, however attenuated—it can disappear from view for several spreads and rarely exceeds a few short lines when it re-emerges—does thread together a series of impressionistic responses to the photographs, thus enhancing the book’s status as a planned and coherent narrative rather than a simple collection of photographs.
The book opens and ends with full-page portraits of Coleman Hawkins, both almost certainly exposed on the same roll of film but which, by encapsulating the entire narrative, illustrate DeCarava’s notion of the whole book taking place in a moment or over a lifetime: “It is a moment, a lifetime or a set, the time that elapses is not important.” Hawkins seems a significant choice. As an innovative musician, he was always willing to take risks and make new departures, moving gracefully from the swing era to, ultimately, the civil rights polemics of the album We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, released in 1960. Scott DeVeaux’s comment that, on his return from Europe after the start of World War II, Hawkins offered “process, a way of playing that privileged the virtuoso over the composer” (rather than the “product” of the “romantic popular song”) may suggest his appeal to DeCarava and the photographer’s own privileging of the individual.16
After this opening shot, there are eight pages before another musician appears. The first double spread is filled with a photograph of the blurred tops of leafless trees. The next spread sets a photograph of a dim and narrow canyon in the financial district, empty apart from a cat strolling up its sterile, scoured sidewalk—an unheroic version of Paul Strand’s Wall Street—against what looks like a scene out of Jacob Riis’s social documentary, How the Other Half Lives, depicting the back lot of tenement buildings, filled with debris, above which the flags of washing fly, a trope for the slum used in many other photographs of Harlem from the 1930s onward. The contrast between white and black Manhattan is made polemical.
The next four photographs show young boys and men: the first, a lone figure isolated in the middle of a long avenue; the second, an older boy posed standing alone in a bleak vacant lot; this mid-shot is followed by a close-up of another young boy’s intelligent, questioning face; finally, a young man stares broodingly from the shadows of his room, the unkempt shelves of books behind him a synecdoche of youthful culture and sensitivity. My suggested sequence then ends with a portrait of a young trumpeter, the bell of his instrument close to the lens, seeming to blow sound out of the frame. What this sequence achieves, in my reading, is an account of how jazz emerges from the realities of urban experience. Beginning with the notion of the natural rhythm of life, captured in the waving branches of the winter trees, the photographer then makes it clear that the man-made world is divided between wealth and poverty, Wall Street and the ghetto. It is in this harsher environment that young people grow up to become jazz musicians, eager to voice their questions about why the world is as it is. The sound of the jazz trumpet may bring down the walls of Jericho—or Wall Street.
The notion of a society out of order is suggested by a later series of images that have no obvious jazz connections but, in the larger context of the book, provide powerful material for bebop’s intense musical questioning and protest. The first, which takes up a whole double spread, is a graphic tour de force, set in the seedy half-light of a subway station. What we actually see is the sign on the women’s toilet—Out of Order—and on the wall an advertisement for the New York Daily News, featuring a drawing of a weeping woman and the curious headline: “Why did she leave her baby in a tree?” Above it is an official sign reminding passengers that spitting is illegal. What we may sense in this composition, however, is a metaphor for societal breakdown and family tragedy. If so, that seems to be confirmed by the following spreads, in which the image of the mother and child, used to powerful effect by photographers of the Depression like Dorothea Lange, is again called upon to evoke human disaster.
Other sequences are less concerned with everyday life than jazz’s own historical narrative. In a series of six photographs of trumpeters, DeCarava cleverly charts the way that jazz musicians, at least until the mid-1960s, would set a challenge for the next generation of musicians to pick up. The first picture shows the bell of a trumpet poking into the side of the frame, seeming to produce the rococo flourish of the decoration on the far wall of the jazz club. This fanfare evokes the flair of the soloist, embodied most famously in the beaming figure caught in mid-Harlem stroll: Louis Armstrong. Next comes Dixielander Wild Bill Davison, followed by Dizzy Gillespie, one of the main architects of bebop, and then a typically pensive Miles Davis, master of cool. The final trumpeter and the youngest is apparently unknown; he stands for the latest in a long line of trumpeters, ready to take jazz to new heights of expression.
In the longest jazz sequence in the book, near the end, DeCarava records an event which I believe is the celebrated occasion at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1956, when Duke Ellington’s waning popularity was reignited by a concert that featured an extraordinary rendition of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, featuring no fewer than twenty-seven solo choruses by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves. In the first few images, white New Yorkers are shown as if preparing for a night out. The series of concert images that follow is bookended by portraits of Duke Ellington; the first shows him in action at the piano while, in the final image, he stands with arms folded and a look of satisfaction in his eyes. Between these pictures is an establishing shot of the crowd and then a series of striking images of the elegant woman who, apparently, drove the band on to further efforts through her abandoned dancing; that sequence ends with a shot of the saxophones—a baritone in the foreground—which returns us synecdochally to the music that inspired her dancing, an act of closure confirmed by Ellington’s smile on the opposite page.
The ending of the sound i saw reprises its beginning by returning to a pastoral theme in the final double spread, part of which depicts waving wheat rather than winter branches, perhaps suggesting a more hopeful harvest—before the book ends with the second image of Coleman Hawkins, taken perhaps a fraction of a second after the opening shot.
What marks out the sound i saw from almost all other jazz photography texts created then or since is its refusal to remove jazz from the everyday life it emerges from. Mixing pictures of jazz performances and jam sessions with photographs taken in the streets and homes of Harlem enables DeCarava to make suggestive visual connections between jazz and everyday life, relating the body and performance of the black musicians to the fabric of the wider society in which they function as commentators and critics.
This connection is made flesh in two photographs that share a single page early in the sound i saw. The one that occupies the top half of the page shows four boys playing outside a brownstone. They make full use of the possibilities of the architecture and the spaces it creates: the steps, the fire escape, the win-dowsills. In fact, they play just as their four adult counterparts, playing double bass in the image below, create music: through improvisation. The connection within each quartet is personal and intimate; one might even imagine the four boys growing up to become the bassists. DeCarava has found a kind of equivalence here between the life of the street and the jam session.
Coleman Hawkins. 1956.
Copyright © Roy and Sherry DeCarava 2007.
In another pairing, this time across a double spread, jazz confronts the street. On the left is one of DeCarava’s “emergent forms” from the shadows, a young saxophonist awaiting his solo, his instrument slung across his body, its curves and keys catching the light. Opposite him, in contrast, is a day-lit street scene. The lone figure here does not fill the frame like the musician but is dwarfed by the street and literally in the gutter. This is the coalman again, still sweeping coal, face still averted. The juxtaposition seems to have the musician pause to contemplate his brother’s situation or even imagine it—in his preface to the sound i saw, DeCarava writes that what is photographed here is “seen and felt through the eyes and mind of a jazz musician on a stage.”
The link between jazz and everyday life has been made before by critics and musicians. Louis Armstrong is supposed to have said, “What we play is life,” and Beuford Smith told Val Wilmer of the close link between jazz and the streets he photographed: “When I’m walking down the street I may hear a tune by Bird, early Miles or David Murray, and I may see an image that will remind me of a song by Betty Carter or a gesture.”17
On one level, the two pictures might illustrate the limited employment opportunities available to African American men. Harlem had always lacked the demand for manual labor that gave at least intermittent occupation to black workers in cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago, and at the best of times most Harlemites found only cleaning or other menial jobs open to them. A musical career, although hardly well paid or secure, was one of the few ways out of such dead-end lives. It is worth noting here Eric Lott’s comment about bebop making “disciplined imagination alive and answerable” to contemporary social conditions: “ ‘Ko Ko,’ Charlie Parker’s first recorded masterpiece, suggested that jazz was a struggle which pitted mind against the perversity of circumstance, and that in this struggle blinding virtuosity was the best weapon.”18
Jazz, in other words, does not exist in an ivory tower; the jazz performance engages with and critiques everyday life. “Everything a jazzman feels, sees, hears,” continues DeCarava in his preface, “everything he was and is becomes the source and object of his music.” This is a credo aligned to that of the beboppers, however, rather than the world of show business and mass entertainment. Writing about Thelonious Monk, Steven B. Elworth comments: “Instead of a community created by the dance, Monk’s music created a community of listeners and musicians… emblematic of bebop’s earlier attempt to create a counter-public sphere apart from the corrupted social sphere.”19
Like the creators of bebop, DeCarava is painfully aware of the need to move beyond the racist stereotype of the grinning entertainer. His celebrated photograph of professional entertainers dancing at a social club at 110th Street Manor on Fifth Avenue in 1956 is, therefore, highly problematic for DeCarava, despite its celebration of these men’s skills. In 1981, the photographer confessed to “a terrible torment” about the image:
What they actually are is two black male dancers who dance in the manner of an older generation of black vaudeville performers. The problem comes because their figures remind me so much of the real life experience of blacks in their need to put themselves in an awkward position before the man, for the man: to demean themselves in order to survive, to get along.… And yet there is something in the figures not about that; something in the figures that is very creative, that is very real and very black in the finest sense of the word.20
It seems no coincidence that, following immediately overleaf, is a magisterial image of Monk, who stands at ease, clasping a towel, with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Photographed from a low angle, the pianist’s head and torso fill the frame with weight and authority. Away from the keyboard, Monk is cool; there is nothing of the darky entertainer about him, no concessions to “the man”—he has stood up. At the piano, surrounded by a respectful audience, in another portrait included here, his heroic authority is unmistakable.
By 1964, writes Thomas J. Porter, black music had “moved beyond critical realism (criticism of the forms), the high point of Western music, to a music which was both critical and analytical of the social substance of the society.”21 This critique can be registered in other juxtapositions in the sound i saw, such as the placing of an unusual portrait of John Coltrane at rest after a gig opposite that of a worker on the subway grasping a shovel, whose handle frames a weary face. Each photograph signifies the moment after hard labor; each man is a worker, struggling against the grain of the material world.
The cost of that struggle is written into the body and into what the body touches, as another double spread attests. Here, a picture of a bass player is set against that of a double bass; both are marked, one with the strain and sweat of performance, the other scratched, indented, and pounded by daily use.
Years before the publication of the sound i saw, DeCarava told Val Wilmer that music “wove in and out of these people’s lives” and that, for him, musicians, no matter how celebrated, were simply “people who worked.”22 Sherry Turner De-Carava detects this view of jazz players in one of DeCarava’s more well-known pictures, a photograph of Roy Haynes, Jimmy Jones, and Joe Benjamin walking off stage after a performance:
This could only be a photographic image and it could only be about jazz. It is also not about jazz. With a subtle but important shift of emphasis it is about workers. Musicians carry music mentally and physically and the physical labor involved is a labor of love, with attitudes that necessarily reflect discipline—tautness and control.23
When I approached the publishers in some despair at not being able to identify some of the jazz musicians depicted in the book, they wrote back to confirm that they had produced this book “as an exact facsimile of the book Mr. DeCarava had mocked up himself,” that is, without any identifying captions.24 DeCarava does not want to turn jazz musicians into icons. He does not seek out “famous musicians doing famous or dramatic things” in his photography of jazz, any more than he seeks out celebrated landmarks in his photographic surveys of Harlem life or bizarre confrontations in the street.
The democratic DeCarava may not subscribe to the (overwhelmingly white) jazz press’s tendency to create celebrities, and he shows that jazz musicians like other physical workers sweat and subside with fatigue, but he emphasizes another quality, a particular greatness that is, in the end, spiritual—a quest for transcendence. The special work of jazz musicians—those, like Coltrane, that DeCarava particularly admires—may be depicted as the work of the flesh, but the spirit is detectable in his photographs, assisted by some of the formal and metaphorical strengths noted earlier: a mood or tone created by the play of available light and dense shadows; the unposed yet composed image of the subject, taken in close-up and filling the frame; the apparent reaching out beyond a simple documenting of music being played.
DeCarava’s pictures are not taken in a studio but at clubs or concert halls, during performances, rehearsals, and recording sessions. Unlike many other photographers, he often focuses in tight on individual players and their personal communion with their instrument, rather than setting them within a community of players. He has said that, for him, jazz is “a musical expression of subjective individual emotions by particular individuals in their own unique way.” In this respect, he seems to have been, in part, simply responding to changes in the meaning and performance of jazz itself.
While noting that DeCarava has taken pictures of ensembles and audiences, critic Peter Galassi believes that his best work is of individuals “isolated, self-possessed and, when performing, utterly absorbed in the act of creation.” This, Galassi asserts, links his work to bebop, which, contrary to the ethos of the swing era, “rested upon the conviction that to make music was not to entertain others, but to plumb the self.”25 However, DeCarava’s emphasis on the individual is more than a response to this specific cultural shift, as his statement, made on camera for the publication of the sound i saw, implies:
What intrigued me about the music aspect of [this book] was that you heard things and you were attracted to the music, but visually you’re attracted to the people making the music.… The creative process becomes very visible, because musicians express themselves in a physical way.… Even when they’re still, there’s this musicality that expresses itself in their body.
For younger African American photographers like Beuford Smith, DeCarava’s innovative series of pictures of drummer Elvin Jones sets the standard for jazz portraiture: “I am still trying to get my ‘Elvin Jones’! Roy is like Coleman Hawkins. What tenor player has not played a few Hawk riffs?”26
What is particularly daring in the portrait included in the sound i saw is that Jones’s instrument itself is hardly visible at all. Only a slightly paler, curved shadow among deeper shadows indicates the ghostly presence of a cymbal. What does catch the light brilliantly are the beads of perspiration streaming down the musician’s face, a sign, perhaps, of the dark body that W. E. B. Du Bois writes of, “whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder,” but also of something beyond the clichés of hard labor; Sherry Turner DeCarava likens them to glistening thorns.27 In an indeterminate context—no stage or fellow musician is evident—and without props, Jones determines his own space through the intensity of his flexed body and an ecstasy of concentration breaking free of the formal lines and tidiness of his jacket, shirt, and the tie still neatly knotted at his neck.
This portrait also bears out the general assessment, by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, of DeCarava’s use of “dark spaces” to “humanize subjects who are frequently viewed only as stereotypes”: “That he photographs his black subjects in a dark space compels the viewer to adjust his vision, to make subtle distinctions, to see shades of meaning and emotion as well as light.”28
For Max Kozloff, these shadows seem to be “a nutrient or benevolent zone for emergent forms” and this could apply equally to one celebrated portrait of John Coltrane included in the sound i saw, where the saxophonist seems to emerge out of dense shadows to play in light.29 Again, the photographer has moved in very close to the musician, here playing a soprano saxophone that is blurred as if producing Coltrane’s celebrated “sheets of sound” in a flurry of flowing highlights. Maren Stange notes that in DeCarava’s portraits of Coltrane “light and dark values render plastic expressive qualities, rather than offering literal records.”30 Scott Saul goes further, claiming that the photographer conveys Coltrane’s “new spirituality literally at work,” and arguing that DeCarava’s “shadowy palette” echoes “the minor blues so beloved by the saxophonist.”31 Certainly, DeCarava seems to have admired Coltrane’s style and how it emerged from within: “The bar would close and the audience would go home, and Trane would keep playing, trying to find what more there was inside.”32
Kozloff ’s notion of DeCarava’s jazz musician as a “heroic figure… resistant to and immersed within its space” is applicable even when the playing has stopped, as it has, momentarily perhaps, in the portrait of Lester Young included in the book. As in many other jazz portraits by DeCarava, Young is photographed slightly from below, giving him a commanding presence. Available light serves to emphasize his face and to pick out the keys of the saxophone he holds ready for the next solo. Other than that, all is shadowy space. Young is aware of the camera here, but he is not holding a pose or grinning. His seriousness is echoed in a photograph of the craftsman-like figure of Roy Haynes trying out a drum pattern on a workbench. Here, the metaphorical use of light to create a visual space for sound—where players emerge into a brilliance their playing seems to have created—is made literal in the lamp’s pool of light that illuminates the music’s essentials: the blurred sticks, the musician’s hands and his thoughtful, soulful expression as he focuses on producing the beat.
Haynes, Jones, and Benjamin. 1956.
Copyright © Roy and Sherry DeCarava 2007.
the sound i saw reveals a peculiarly sensitive and acute eye, whether registering the everyday world or the more intense space of the jazz performer. The juxtaposed depictions of each help us to detect how jazz might be located within a complex cultural, social, and economic context, in a kind of visual mapping. The next question to address is whether and how far these photographs manage to approximate jazz in their “performance” on the eye.
Seeing DeCarava’s portraits of John Coltrane in Thru Black Eyes at the Studio Museum in Harlem back in 1970, A. D. Coleman believed that, like Bird, Coltrane lived on: “The music, as well as the man, can be felt in them.” Indeed, Coleman is—or was—a believer in the close affinity of photography with jazz, both forms created from urban contingencies. This closeness was not only evident in the product—the photograph that can evoke the sound of Coltrane—but embedded in the process of the photographic act itself:
In its rhythmic and harmonic attitudes, in its emphasis on intuition, spontaneity, and improvisation… jazz is directly linked to the idea of creativity as a process-consciousness, as flow in a Zen sense. Its kinship with photography should be obvious. Photography—especially documentary photography—is concerned with precisely that same flow.33
The African American, in Coleman’s view, was even more likely to recognize those links, having “osmotically absorbed the cultural precepts which produced jazz” and thereby acquiring “an almost instinctual affinity for… what might be called the photographic attitude, to which an awareness of the rhythms of life, the flux of events, is indispensable.”34
Roy DeCarava is, himself, equally convinced of the kinship between jazz and photography. His title—the sound i saw—neatly asserts the power of the visual to represent the aural, while his subtitle—improvisation on a jazz theme—claims that, just as a musician like Coltrane can explore musical material through experimentation with a given chord sequence, the photographer can also improvise on a visual theme:
There’s a time-quality, a time-perception attributable to both [jazz and photography]. In other words, there is an immediacy to photography in that one must photograph something that exists at a given time.… And jazz music is like that because jazz music is based on the improvisation of an individual who at one time brings all of his talents to bear at the precise moment he’s playing. So you have the same kind of immediacy.35
In both cases, personal feelings and professional training come together dynamically to explore the present.
In one of the few detailed considerations I have discovered of DeCarava’s work in jazz criticism, Scott Saul appears to go along with these claims in his examination of DeCarava’s series of portraits of Coltrane:
[DeCarava’s] small-camera “candid” approach built on many of the same premises as Coltrane’s music. Both attuned themselves to the opportunities of a fleeting moment, and both clutched these improvisatory opportunities out of remarkable constraints—the static modal forms in the music, the dark palette that came with photographing a nightclub.36
Even the move to abstraction could be discerned in both men’s creative process, he argues. No less an authority than Peter Galassi remarks that “in true improvisation there is no room for dissembling, for emotional dishonesty, because it is instantly, transparently revealed. DeCarava’s pictures (and not only his jazz pictures) show that the same is true of photography.”37
While we may remain skeptical of such large claims, there are some intriguing formal similarities or echoes between making jazz and taking photographs that deserve further examination. One of these is what we might call photographic rhythm and flow. Sherry Turner DeCarava argues that individual photographs by DeCarava demonstrate rhythm and flow as “distinct ways of structuring space.” In her analysis of the portrait of Haynes, Jones, and Benjamin, she writes:
The composition… has a vital architectonic feel in the upbeat tempo, the heel lifted from the floor and the slight tilt to the stage. From floor to ceiling the formalities swing.… The figures, with their succinct, dynamic shapes, staccato like quarter notes across the tonal reflections of space.38
Equally, rhythm and flow can be found in the visual connections, rhymes, and repetitions between and among sequences of photographs. For example, three consecutive photographs focus on hands: in the first case, the camera focuses on a singer’s fingers gently touching around a mike stand; in the second, although most of this image of a young woman is not in sharp focus, the angle emphasizes the hands over the face, fingers again curled into an expressive form; in the third, light spills over the piano to highlight the curved fingers of a pianist striking a chord. DeCarava’s belief that the making of music is made visible through the body is evident here, but the inclusion of the young woman, a non-musician who may or may not be a member of a jazz club audience, as an equivalent may serve to root the making of jazz in a more general human desire to articulate feelings. The striking of a certain cluster of piano keys may be, at bottom, an extension of a common emotion or a passionate argument as much as a musical choice.
Of a photograph of vibes player Milt Jackson, Sherry Turner DeCarava has written, “There was an out-of-this-world concentration of the musician and there was a sense of reverence in his posture, in his attention and his concentration, just in the way he held himself—the thrust of his neck, the hands almost clasped in prayer.”39 In the sound i saw, this photograph shares a spread with another figure, this one a white pedestrian with similarly clasped and prayerful hands in the middle of a New York crowd. The echoes of gesture seem deliberate, their juxtaposition again, perhaps, intended to link human feeling to musical expression. The droll picture that follows this spread, which depicts a female supplicant sitting under the corporate steel letters of the Stern Brothers building, her hands also clasped, might begin to suggest a simple delight in visual coincidences and puns, not unlike the playful call-and-response elements in some black music. This notion of call-and-response could even be extended to describe the way in which photographs of jazz and everyday life both complement and collide with each other through the book. The process of selection seems, therefore, no more anarchic than the improvisation of a jazz musician, but similarly built on patterns and pulses, themes and resolution.
“The story, ideas and incidents related are expressed as a stream of images,” writes DeCarava, perhaps deliberately linking his approach to that of literary modernism’s stream-of-consciousness technique in approaching narrative. In claiming, in his subtitle, to be improvising “on a jazz theme,” he claims kinship with jazz heroes like Coltrane, whose technique eschews easy closure. As in these literary and musical procedures, DeCarava’s photographic narrative does not proceed from beginning to middle to end but meanders, interrupts itself, and returns to reconsider earlier material. In resisting closure and privileging improvisation in the sound i saw, DeCarava wants to identify himself as the equivalent of a bebop musician, and he extends this analogy in describing the way in which he takes photographs:
It’s almost like physics; there’s an arc of being. There’s a beginning, then the peak is reached and then there’s the end.… At the peak there is no movement.… It is that moment I wait for.… The moment when all the forces fuse, when all is in equilibrium, that’s the eternal… that’s jazz… and that’s life.40
DeCarava’s definition of a would-be bebop photography based on improvisation seems persuasive, founded on the apparent similarity of the epiphanies experienced by the jazz musician hitting just the right note and the photographer activating the shutter at just the right moment. Yet, as Peter Townsend has argued, he elides the wider process and context in which the two artists reach those moments, their particular and very different struggles with material “out there.”41 The material DeCarava has to deal with is far less predictable than in the freest kind of free jazz, and he has far less control over it; as a (non-directorial) photographer, he has a purely responsive relationship to what is out there. He is passive in the best sense, remaining alert to the appearance of potential subject matter.
In fact, DeCarava’s statement about the instant when “all is in equilibrium” is closer to a redescription of a peculiarly photographic concept: the “decisive moment,” first formulated in Images à la Sauvette by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1952:
How can the subject be denied? It asserts itself.… all we need do is be clear about what is going on and be honest about what we feel.… Through us bearing (a kind of) witness, we see and make others see the world around us. The event itself, exercising its proper role, stimulates the organic rhythm of forms.42
Furthermore, DeCarava’s artistic intervention is not spotlit, as Coltrane’s might be, but hidden. Reviewing a collection of images by unknown photographers, Geoff Dyer observes:
A by-product of what many photographers crave—to be able to go about their business unnoticed, ideally invisibly—anonymity can also be proof of success. To create an image everyone knows, to have disappeared into your subject matter, is in some way the perfect expression of the photographer’s art.43
That invisibility is enacted by DeCarava himself in his own self-portraits; one included in the sound i saw depicts the photographer as an invisible man, or at least one in an ambiguous state: neither entirely visible nor quite invisible. As C. D. Mitchell describes it: “DeCarava aimed the camera at his own reflection in a mirror, then stepped aside during the exposure. The blur that remains is almost invisible, but its presence is undeniable.”44
This kind of “invisibility” is, of course, of peculiar significance in black culture. One explanation for it would begin with the celebrated observation, made by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, that the “problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”45 This line both segregates and veils black people, placing them out of sight. This invisibility extends from the macro-spatial level of the “black city” to the “absent space” of the black person—following Franz Fanon, Lewis Gordon argues that a “stark evasion manifests itself in the face of the black body [which]… lives in an antiblack world as a form of absence of human presence.”46 This spatial distancing or evasion of the black body is most famously expressed by Ralph Ellison in his novel, Invisible Man:
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.… it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.47
Copyright © Roy and Sherry DeCarava 2007.
DeCarava’s elective invisibility is thus, in my view, of a different order than that of a white photographer, like Walker Evans, even when the latter shoots his subway portraits with a hidden camera. I would also argue that his take on the “decisive moment” is similarly shaped by a black sensibility formed through segregation and racism. What makes DeCarava a supreme jazz photographer is not that he functions as a musician would but that he has a deep and passionate understanding of their shared condition:
If you don’t capture it at that moment, all you get is a transitory particular. When you find it at the right moment, it is not only particular, it is universal. The only way to do this is to be in tune, to have the same sense of time that the subject has. This means that you have to give yourself to the subject, accept their sense of time.48
DeCarava’s riffing on jazz and timing recalls an extraordinary passage from the opening pages of Invisible Man. Ellison’s beleaguered protagonist has, literally, gone to ground. In a makeshift cellar beneath the streets, he has one “radio-phonograph” but would like five, so that he can listen to five recordings of Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” all playing at once. He believes that Armstrong makes “poetry out of being invisible” probably because, unlike Invisible Man himself, he is “unaware that he is invisible.” His own “grasp of invisibility,” he tells us, helps him to understand Armstrong’s music:
Invisibility… gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.49
This seems close to how DeCarava operates. After all, photographs may be seen as offering “points where time stands still,” the photographer breaking into the flux of being to create event and meaning, carving out a space for us to “look around.”
Alain Dister remarks that “without jazz, it would be difficult to understand the personality and the work of Roy DeCarava.”50 The same might equally be said of Ralph Ellison, another sensibility saturated in jazz—its history, its meaning, its struggle—and whose work, including Invisible Man, can be seen as a literary response to the call of jazz. For both artists, jazz is synonymous with everyday life in the black community, a way of making sense of the world and a means of survival. In considering the relationship between jazz and everyday life in his essay “Living with Music,” Ellison could almost be writing about DeCarava’s art or his own, instead of describing a jam session:
I had learned too that the end of all this discipline and technical mastery was the desire to express an affirmative way of life through its musical tradition, and that this tradition insisted that each artist achieve his creativity within its frame.… Life could be harsh, loud and wrong if it wished, but they lived it fully, and when they expressed their attitude toward the world it was with a fluid style that reduced the chaos of living to form.51
Photos in this chapter are placed and captioned according to Roy DeCarava’s preferences. Mr. DeCarava has kindly allowed me to reproduce four photographs from his book; these are placed at intervals in the text in the order he has requested, which differs from their order of appearance in the sound i saw and from my reference to them in this chapter.
1. Roy DeCarava, the sound i saw: improvisation on a jazz theme (London: Phaidon Press, 2001). As this volume is unpaginated, I have tried to describe as clearly as possible which photographs are being analyzed so that readers may find them in the published work.
2. Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
3. Peter Galassi, Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996).
4. Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
5. Quoted in Galassi, Roy DeCarava, 22.
6. Quoted in ibid., 19. The proposal quoted in part in this monograph is, I am informed by Roy DeCarava (in an e-mail of 9 June 2007), “inaccurate due to the historical circumstances of its making”:
It was heavily edited and frankly, largely written by a gallerist and a photographer [who] volunteered to help a young artist with the administrative filings as they indicated that they were more familiar with the formalities required by the committee. The finished essay was not in my style of writing, although they attempted to put it in my voice and it did not accurately reflect my attitudes or intentions about photography or about the Guggenheim “project.” While I was grateful for their assistance at the time, I was also noncommittal about the whole process, since I doubted that I would ever receive the award.
7. I am very grateful to Roy DeCarava for the following two statements (made to me by e-mail, on 9 and 29 June 2007, respectively) clarifying, first, how he views attempts to pigeonhole his work into genres or schools:
I have indicated on several occasions in both print and interview that while there are some superficial similarities between me and the “New York school” of photography (if you believe there was such a school), that similarity is primarily one of location. Our respective concerns were and remain worlds apart. I am an artist first and foremost, not a documentarian or a street photographer (again, if you believe there is such a school).
and, second, what approach he took to photography in the 1950s:
At the time, there were several lineages of documentary photography. While I felt a kinship with the tradition, I never felt really able to embrace them as they seemed too directorial and impersonal to me. My own predilections led more toward what might be called non-photographic events. It is difficult to describe precisely what these are. Sometimes writers look at the world as a particular narrative composed of a logical sequence of events in time. A poet may explore a play of the elements in a moment, wherein disruption causes things to break open many possibilities, meanings or visions. This is closer to what was on my mind in the 1950s.
8. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Images à la Sauvette (Paris: Éditions Verve, 1952), n.p. My translation.
9. None of the photographs are conventionally captioned in the sound i saw; where captions are given, as here, they are taken from Galassi, Roy DeCarava.
10. Lane Barden, “Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective,” review of exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Artweek 28 (January 1997): 24.
11. Sherry Turner DeCarava, Introduction, Roy DeCarava: Photographs, ed. James Alinder (Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1981), 8.
12. Walker Evans, American Photographs (1938; reprint, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988); Robert Frank, The Americans (1958; reprint, Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications, 1993).
13. Jane Livingston, The New York School: Photographs 1936–1963 (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1992), 78.
14. This and later extracts are taken from my transcription of a video statement by Roy DeCarava to promote the sound i saw, included on the Phaidon Web site at www.phaidon.com.
15. Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 195.
16. Quoted in Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz (London: Continuum, 2002), 415.
17. Quoted in Val Wilmer, “Beuford Smith: In the Humane Tradition,” Ten.8 24 (1987): 30.
18. Eric Lott, “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 243.
19. Steven B. Elworth, “Jazz in Crisis, 1948–1958: Ideology and Representation,” in Gabbard, Jazz Among the Discourses, 61.
20. Quoted in Galassi, Roy DeCarava, 25.
21. Thomas J. Porter, “The Social Roots of African American Music, 1950–1970,” in African American Jazz and Rap: Social and Philosophical Examinations of Black Expressive Behaviour, ed. James L. Conyers Jr. (Jefferson, NC: McFa-rland, 2001), 86.
22. Quoted in Val Wilmer, “Roy DeCarava: An Uncommon Beauty,” Ten.8 27 (1987): 8–9.
23. S. T. DeCarava, Introduction, 16.
24. E-mail from Megan McFarland at Phaidon Press (New York), sent to the author 18 June 2004.
25. Galassi, Roy DeCarava, 26.
26. Quoted in Wilmer, “Beuford Smith,” 29.
27. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 3; S. T. DeCarava, Introduction, 18.
28. Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander: A History of Street Photography (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), 342.
29. Max Kozloff, “Time Stands Still: The Photographs of Roy DeCarava,” Artforum International 34.9 (May 1996): 124.
30. Maren Stange, “ ‘Illusion Complete within Itself ’: Roy DeCarava’s Photography,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996): 63.
31. Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 249–50.
32. Quoted in Galassi, Roy DeCarava, 26.
33. A. D. Coleman, Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings 1968–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 18.
34. Ibid., 62.
35. Quoted in Wilmer, “Roy DeCarava,” 6.
36. Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, 250.
37. Galassi, Roy DeCarava, 26–27.
38. S. T. DeCarava, Introduction, 19; 15–16.
39. Ibid., 17.
40. Quoted in ibid., 19–20.
41. See Peter Townsend, Jazz in American Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), esp. 154–55, 163–66. Townsend is usefully skeptical of claims that photography or other art forms, including literature and painting, can literally evoke the presence or the sound of jazz, arguing that such representations often reduce its complexities to “the simplicity of myth.” His comments on the different forms improvisation takes across these art forms have also been helpful in shaping my arguments.
42. Cartier-Bresson, Images à la Sauvette, n.p. My translation.
43. Geoff Dyer, “Vacuum of the Visible,” Guardian Review, 30 October 2004: 19.
44. C. D. Mitchell, “Roy DeCarava at Ariel Meyerowitz,” Art in America 92.4 (April 2004):133.
45. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, xxxi.
46. Lewis R. Gordon, Existence in Black: An Anthology of Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 72.
47. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1965), 7.
48. Quoted in S. T. DeCarava, Introduction, 19–20.
49. Ellison, Invisible Man, 11.
50. Alain Dister, Black Photography in America, unpaginated exhibit (New York: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, n.d.). This is a reprinted extract from Cimaise 197 (November–December 1988): 85–120.
51. Ralph Ellison, “Living with Music” (1955), reprinted in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 229.
Barden, Lane. “Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective.” Review of exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Artweek 28 (January 1997): 24.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. Images à la Sauvette. Paris: Éditions Verve, 1952.
Coleman, A. D. Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings 1968–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
DeCarava, Roy. the sound i saw: improvisation on a jazz theme. London: Phaidon Press, 2001.
DeCarava, Roy, and Langston Hughes. The Sweet Flypaper of Life. 1955. Reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.
DeCarava, Sherry Turner. Introduction. In Roy DeCarava: Photographs. Ed. James Alinder. Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1981. 41–60.
Dister, Alain. Black Photography in America. Unpaginated exhibit. New York: Schomburg Center for Black Music Research, n.d. [Reprinted extract from Cimaise 197 (November–December 1988): 85–120.]
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Reprint, New York: Bantam, 1989.
Dyer, Geoff. “Vacuum of the Visible.” Guardian Review, 30 October 2004: 19.
Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: Modern Library, 1995.
———. Invisible Man. 1952. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1965.
Elworth, Steven B. “Jazz in Crisis, 1948–1958: Ideology and Representation.” In Gabbard, Jazz Among the Discourses, 57–75.
Evans, Walker. American Photographs. 1938. Reprint, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1993.
Frank, Robert. The Americans. 1958. Reprint, Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1993.
Gabbard, Krin, ed. Jazz Among the Discourses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Galassi, Peter. Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
Gordon, Lewis R. Existence in Black: An Anthology of Existential Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Kozloff, Max. “Time Stands Still: The Photographs of Roy DeCarava.” Artforum International 34.9 (May 1996): 78–83.
Livingston, Jane. The New York School: Photographs 1936–1963. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1992.
Lott, Eric. “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style.” In Gabbard, Jazz Among the Discourses, 243–55.
Mitchell, C. D. “Roy DeCarava at Ariel Meyerowitz.” Art in America 92.4 (April 2004): 133.
Porter, Eric. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians Artists, Critics, and Activists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Porter, Thomas J. “The Social Roots of African American Music, 1950–1970.” In African American Jazz and Rap: Social and Philosophical Examinations of Black Expressive Behavior. Ed. James L. Conyers Jr. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. 83–89.
Saul, Scott. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Shipton, Alyn. A New History of Jazz. London: Continuum, 2002.
Stange, Maren. “ ‘Illusion Complete within Itself ’: Roy DeCarava’s Photography.” Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996): 63–92.
Townsend, Peter. Jazz in American Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Westerbeck, Colin, and Joel Meyerowitz. Bystander: A History of Street Photography. London: Thames & Hudson, 1994.
Willis, Deborah. Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
Wilmer, Val. “Beuford Smith: In the Humane Tradition.” Ten.8 24 (1987): 26–33.
———. “Roy DeCarava: An Uncommon Beauty.” Ten.8 27 (1987): 2–11.
