Classic Photographs
Classic Photographs
Roy DeCarava
John Coltrane, Half Note
Lot Closed
October 5, 02:21 PM GMT
Estimate
20,000 - 30,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Roy DeCarava
1919 - 2009
John Coltrane, Half Note
gelatin silver print, signed in pencil in the margin, mounted, credit and title in pencil on the reverse, framed, 1960, probably printed later
image: 13 by 9 ¼ in. (33 by 23.6 cm.)
frame: 20 by 16 ¼ in. (50.8 by 41.3 cm.)
Collection of Shirley Carter Burden
By descent through family to the present owners
Roy DeCarava, The Sound I Saw: Improvisation on a Jazz Theme (New York, 2001), unpaginated
‘Jazz to me is a musical expression of subjective individual emotions by particular individuals in their own unique way. Everything a jazzman feels, sees, hears, everything he was and is becomes the source and object of his music. It is a music purchased with dues of hardship, suffering and pain, optimism and love.'
-Roy DeCarava, The Sound I Saw: Improvisation on a Jazz Theme
In the 1950s, the street photography aesthetic, so called for its emphasis on candid shots of activities in urban settings, ascended to popularity, particularly in New York. Born and raised in Harlem, Roy DeCarava photographed his neighborhood’s residents, New York’s jazz scene, and the musical personalities so closely associated with both. Described in The New Yorker as ‘a photographer who seems to see best in the dark,’ DeCarava uniquely mastered the technical demands of using a small, hand-held camera to read the gratifying dusk of the nightclubs and taverns where musicians performed. (Goings on About Town, The New Yorker, 13 March 2006, p. 18)