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Light Break presents the first survey since 1996 of photographer
Roy DeCarava, an essential figure of American art and culture,
whose "poetry of vision" re-forms urban life, labor, love, and jazz
into the discovery of "an intimate, emotional arc of
transformation." Though DeCarava often refrained from public
discussion of his work, this catalogue provides important
background into determining factors of his aesthetic
sensibility--his traditional training in painting and printmaking
as well as his philosophical undertakings. It brings the viewer to
a consideration of contradictory precepts in DeCarava's work that
seeks resolution through tonal and structural elements within the
image. Light Break presents a wide-ranging selection of DeCarava's
photographs accompanied by a preface by Zoe Whitley, an American
curator based in London, and features an introduction and essay by
curator and art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava. Titled
"Celebration," Turner DeCarava's essay considers the artist's
singular poetic vision, his timeless portrayals of individuals and
places, and his mastery of composition and photographic
printmaking. "In making photographs, as in life, DeCarava was
patient. Possessing both a peerless self-awareness and acute
observational skills, he knew intuitively when to wait and when to
open the camera's shutter. In the dark room, he availed himself of
these same attributes, moving with steady assurance to develop his
prints so as to allow the full range of what he called his
"infinite scale of grey tones"--often realized at the deepest end
of the spectrum--to emerge slowly and fully." This exquisite volume
showcases a dynamic range of images that underscore DeCarava's
subtle mastery of tonal and spatial elements across a wide,
fascinating array of subject matter: from the figural implications
of smoke and debris to the "shimmering mirror beneath a mother as
she walks with her children in the morning light." These
photographs express a strength of imagery--an intent to synchronize
and honor the pulse of art as an emergent signal for creative and
revelatory freedom.
Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw is the pictorial equivalent of jazz.
Here the visionary photographer turns his gaze on legendary jazz
icons John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Ornette
Coleman, among many others. "This is a book about people, about
jazz, and about things. The work between its covers tries to
present images for the head and for the heart and, like its subject
matter, is particular, subjective, and individual," writes
DeCarava. A master of poetic contemplation and of sensual
tonalities in black and white, DeCarava is, above all, a
photographer of people. A member of the post-World War II
generation that sought a new modernist vocabulary, he was first
recognized for his innovative images of life in Harlem (the subject
of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his 1955 collaboration with poet
Langston Hughes) and extraordinary portraits of jazz musicians like
John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday. It is these two
themes-New York and jazz-interwoven and inseparable, that are the
ostensible subject of the sound i saw. However, the seemingly
casual yet deeply felt compositions and the rich, gradient tones of
DeCarava's photographs stir emotions that resonate far beyond one
neighborhood and one era. Conceived, designed, written, and made as
an artist maquette by DeCarava in the early 1960s, the sound i saw
went unpublished for almost half a century until it was printed by
Phaidon in 2001. At its core is a visual and philosophical journey
to plumb the meaning of a creative life. The artist's intention in
proposing a complex relationship between vision and music moves his
comprehensive, decade-long reflection to the status of a magnum
opus. This new edition, co-published by First Print Press and David
Zwirner Books, includes new scholarship by Radiclani Clytus, and
reflections by Sherry Turner DeCarava.
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