Jazz Photos at the Museum of Modern Art?
How it Happened.
by Joy Chambers
Published by the Jazz Journalist Association

"The most moving and beautiful jazz photographs ever made," said chief curator of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art Peter Galassi, who organized a retrospective of 185 35-mm black-and-white prints highlighting Roy DeCarava's 50-year photographic career. The show traveled to major museums in Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Houston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Andover, Massachusetts.
Photo by Joy Chambers
Copyright 2001

Fifteen per cent of the images selected for the retrospcetive by Galassi are related to jazz, but DeCarava's archive contains a treasure trove of more than 400 jazz images taken from the mid-1950's to the mid '60's. He is currently considering the best method of showing these.

DeCarava attained critical success early in his career, but popular recognition remains elusive; one hopes that will be remedied by the current museum retrospective. In 1950, Edward Steichen attended DeCarava's first one-man show, bought a few prints for the Museum of Modern Art, and encouraged the Harlem native to apply for a Guggenheim grant.

DeCarava was the first African American to receive a Guggenheim. The grant money gave him the time to give Harlem "an image of itself" and capture the everyday life of that community from the inside.

These images of daily life of family and community are tender, gentle, and unsentimental. It is not only that the people in the photographs are full of warmth toward each other, but also that the pictures themselves embody that warmth by virtue of their sensuousness and grace.

The poet Langston Hughes tried and failed to get these Harlem images published in book form. Hughes then selected and sequenced some of the images and wrote a lively fictional monologue that links them together to produce the 1995 book Sweet Flypaper of Life.

This book sold out its first edition, won two awards, and has had two subsequent editions published. A retrospective at the Studio Museum of Harlem followed. DeCarava had other shows in other cities but has been neglected by the mainstream colleges. In 1981 the Friends of Photography published a monograph with 82 plates, the primary printed recourse on his work, until the present Museum of Modern Art retrospective catalogue edited by Peter Galassi with an illuminating essay by his wife, art historian Dr. Sherry Turner DeCarava.

In 1956 DeCarava started on a new series of photographs on the theme of jazz, intending to publish these photos in a book to be entitled The Sound I Saw. The book was never published, but in 1983 the Studio Museum in Harlem presented 130 of the photographs. The Museum of Modern Art catalogue has about 20 jazz photos and the Friends of Photography have a few. The vast majority of these images reside in the DeCarava archive, controlled by the photographer and his wife, awaiting their decision on their best use and not known at all to the mainstream jazz audience.

DeCarava avidly shot jazz musicians for about a decade. He missed getting images of Bird and determined that Coltrane would not slip by him. He traveled up and down the East Coast shooting Coltrane. The poster for the Museum of Modern Art retrospective is Coltrane on soprano with the musician pouring his soul into his instrument, which has mutated into a dancing flicker of lights.

DeCarava distills the effect the music has on the musician, instead of the listener. His images of Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lena Horne, Quincy Jones, Thelonious Monk, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, Coleman Hawkins, Milt Jackson, Ornette Coleman, Ben Webster, Louis Armstrong, Roy Haynes, Miles Davis, Hank Mobley, Elvin Jones, and Jackie McLean present individuals absorbed in the act of creation. His images are of these artists as workers, some of their gestures telling us of the improvisation, other of the mental discipline necessary, still others of the nervousness attendant to the act.

DeCarava also understands the nature of achievement. For example, a frame of Louis Armstrong shows him all duded up, great coat streaming, striding gigantically down a Harlem street with his mouth open in joy, a king sashaying across his concrete kingdom, eyed by admirers ogling from windows and doorsteps.

DeCarava is the master of dark tones, not-quite-blacks that lets us see into his shadows. But such grays! Graphite and charcoal, the world seen through a glass darkly. His subjects require study, slowly emerging into view.

DeCarava does not use artificial light and always shoots in black-and-white.

"Photography is not about contrast, though most photographers think it is," explains DeCarava. "It is about tonality, the infinite gradations of white and black."

DeCarava slowed down shooting jazz. He remembers that he began to feel a comfort between listening (feeling) and photographing (seeing), as if the pursuit of one interfered with the other.

We can only hope that his archive will be available soon for our perusal.