Bob Marley’s Accidental Photographer

Maybe you've seen the shot, from 1971, of the photographer Gordon Matta-Clark and a few friends—including the composers Philip Glass and Dickie Landry, with a carving knife—arrayed around a fire pit, under the Brooklyn Bridge, with a whole pig roasting on a spit. This was art, as well as nourishment and, in retrospect, an apt representation of a more feral time. At looker's left, in the photo, is a long-haired conceptual artist from the Bronx named Lee Jaffe, then twenty-three, a Lower East Side loft mate of Matta-Clark's. Jaffe made a film of the stunt, called "Pig Roast." Soon, Clark wrote Jaffe a letter suggesting that Jaffe, in a crowning gesture of artistic self-sacrifice, offer up his own body to be eaten in a restaurant.

A couple of years later, Jaffe was in a midtown hotel room with his friend Jim Capaldi, of the band Traffic, when he was introduced to a quiet but assured Jamaican named Bob Marley. Marley had a cassette with him of his forthcoming album with the Wailers, called "Catch a Fire." The music bowled Jaffe over. He started hanging out with Marley, helping him to procure equipment, and ganja, for an American tour.

Marley invited Jaffe to Jamaica, and he ended up living with Marley and the Wailers at their house in Kingston for the next three years, serving as road manager, booking agent, P.R. man, travel fixer, and eventual harmonica player—the "white Wailer." Jaffe and Marley remained close until Marley's death, in 1981, from melanoma. "I was with Bob when his dreadlocks fell out," Jaffe said.

Along the way, he took photos, compiling what is probably the most intimate visual chronicle of the Wailers and their world. Last month, Rizzoli published a book of his pictures, along with some of his impressionistic reminiscences, titled "Hit Me with Music."

"My job was to get the music out, not take pictures," Jaffe said the other day. "But I was seeing things that I thought would be iconic and historically important." He was sitting on the patio of an apartment tower in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he lives with his girlfriend, a nurse practitioner from Korea. Jaffe, now seventy-seven, had on green track pants, a green sweatshirt, and a green Mets cap.

Backed by a sweeping view of Manhattan, all the way down to the Statue of Liberty, Jaffe told his Marley tales. Of playing the harmonica onstage in Kingston in 1975, when the Wailers warmed up for Marvin Gaye; of the Wailers' first New York appearance, in 1973, at Max's Kansas City, opening for an up-and-comer named Bruce Springsteen; of smoking a spliff with Marley's mother, in Delaware. (Marley, seeing Jaffe and his mom hit it off, asked her, "How come you like white men so much?" Marley's father, whom Marley never met, was white.)

"Bob had this amazing sense of irony," Jaffe said. "In his songs, he could make something so tragic sound funny, without diminishing the tragedy of it." Jaffe turned Marley on to old American blues recordings—Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Son House—to make the case that the rock-and-roll sound that Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island, the Wailers' label, was urging on the band (the opening guitar solo on "Catch a Fire" 's first track, "Concrete Jungle," was played by a white studio whiz from Alabama) actually had a deep connection to Black music, and therefore to Africa and to what Rastafarians called "the sufferers."

"I said, 'You shouldn't feel like you're selling out,' " Jaffe went on. "They got criticized for it. Chris has been criticized." But Blackwell never suggested that they soften their lyrics. "He encouraged them to make it as radical as they knew it should be. The production values just made it possible to expand their audience."

Jaffe got into a battered Volvo and drove down the Palisades to the edge of the Hudson, under the George Washington Bridge. He stood on the shore, looking across the river, under the squeak and clatter of the bridge. He had grown up a mile east, in the Bronx—his father a foreman at a clothing factory, his mother a nurse. "My family were all Communists," he said. The soundtrack of his youth was the demolition of buildings to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway. Across the street was 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where, the same year Jaffe moved in with the Wailers, a Jamaican immigrant named DJ Kool Herc, drawing on dancehall raps from Kingston, invented hip-hop.

Ten years ago, while living on Riverside Drive, Jaffe began photographing the bridge from his apartment every day, in its various moods. When he moved over to the Jersey side, he had a new view of the bridge, and he kept taking pictures, until he had thousands of images. What to do with these? He got back in touch with Dickie Landry, from the pig-roast photo, and asked him to contribute music for a multimedia installation, and then enlisted James Thomas Stevens, a writer of Mohawk descent, whose grandfather had been an ironworker on the bridge, to compose a poem. "Of course, George Washington pretty much hated the Indians," Jaffe said, with a grin.