Coltrane in the Half Light, David Zwirner Hangs Roy DeCarava’s Jazz Photographs
More than 130 images of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis and everyday New York fill the largest showing of this series since 1983.
David Zwirner opened the sound i saw, an exhibition of Roy DeCarava’s jazz photographs, with a reception on September 19 at 606 North Western Avenue. The show, curated by Ebony L. Haynes, runs through October 31.
The pictures date from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Many of the period’s jazz greats, among them Miles Davis, Count Basie, Billie Holiday and John Coltrane, are glimpsed mid-set and offstage in moments of repose, which the gallery says presents them not simply as musical icons but as everyday people, workers trying to make a living. Street scenes of everyday New York life hang among them.
With more than 130 images, the gallery calls it the largest presentation of this body of work since its first exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983, when DeCarava showed 125 photographs. He built the original maquette in the early 1960s with 300 images, and the work was later published by Phaidon in 2001 and reissued by First Print Press and David Zwirner Books in 2019.
The series holds a special place in his work. “As significant as The Sweet Flypaper of Life is within DeCarava’s oeuvre, the sound i saw is singularly noteworthy. Unencumbered by the intrusion of collaboration or an exhibition format that would restrict his editorial vision, it remains DeCarava’s most complete photographic statement to date,” the theorist and filmmaker Radiclani Clytus has written.
Next door, at 616 North Western Avenue, a companion listening room called SIDE B takes its cue from DeCarava’s personal playlists and favorite jazz albums. The exhibition stays on view through October 31.
