Ralph Ellison: Photographer is an exquisitely produced book containing 132 images by the man of letters, whose photographic talent delighted his friends and has long impressed scholars. His friend Shirley Jackson wrote to him in late 1952, months after Invisible Man garnered many rave reviews and had a run on the bestseller list:
[T]hose amazing pictures arrived and why do you keep on writing when you could set yourself up as a fashionable photographer? One of the ones who gets a thousand bucks for spending the day in your home, taking informal pictures of your children. Lunch thrown in. We agree in thinking that the picture of Sally with the hand with six fingers is probably the best baby picture we have ever seen. Sell it to the Heinz baby food people.
She was not kidding. In another letter, Jackson advises Ellison to “run a cute ad in the NYer” as a photographer of babies. This is not far-fetched; Ellison had been a successful professional photographer for several years.
He wishes to hear a Louis Armstrong record with his “whole body.”
Readers of Invisible Man are often startled by the vivid image in the prologue of the narrator basking in the light of 1,369 lightbulbs in his underground lair—an unprecedented scene that seems to suggest someone caught perpetually in the brightness of a camera bulb’s flash. The scene has inspired photographers such as Gordon Parks and Jeff Wall to stage and shoot it. Wall’s photograph After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000) is in the Museum of Modern Art. Fewer people probably recall that the narrator fantasizes about having his body transform into a giant ear of sorts; he wishes to hear a Louis Armstrong record with his “whole body,” perhaps a riff on Ellison’s namesake Ralph Waldo Emerson’s metaphor of his body’s becoming a “transparent eye-ball.” These themes in the novel reflect the gigs and hobbies that occupied Ellison’s mind and time away from the typewriter; he also worked in these years as an assistant to the inventor and audio engineer David Sarser, helping to install Sarser’s state-of-the-art sound systems for clients such as Arturo Toscanini.
But photography was his main sideline. Ellison even had stationery made for this burgeoning business, which doubled as a serious hobby in which he documented daily life in Manhattan—mostly Harlem, but Chinatown too. (Some of the best pictures in the book are of Chinatown scenes.) He photographed authors for book jackets, covered the Westminster dog show, had the thrilling task of shooting dental-office equipment, and even started to break into the world of art photography, taking at least one picture of a painting for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
This collection of what he was seeing, framing, shooting, and developing while at work on Invisible Man is a remarkable addition to American cultural history. What if there were books of Proust’s photography of Paris in 1900, or of Pynchon’s photography of 1960s California? Ralph Ellison: Photographer is a treasure like those hypothetical books would be.
Ellison and Gordon Parks were close friends and collaborators in the late 1940s. Parks’s photographs (with captions by Ellison) were to have illustrated Ellison’s essay “Harlem Is Nowhere.” The project got tangled up in a small magazine’s bankruptcy in 1948, and Ellison’s essay was not published until 1964. The project was reconstructed and the collaboration given extensive scholarly treatment in Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem, the catalogue to a 2016 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. That book was published—as is Ralph Ellison: Photographer—as a collaboration between Steidl, the Gordon Parks Foundation, and the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust. This new volume builds on the success of that catalogue. Anyone interested in one book should consult the other; they are like companion volumes. Both are similar in spare design and elegant layout. Both have lists of plates at the end, with full-size images left to stand alone on the page without descriptions.
Although Ellison was not in Parks’s league as a photographer, some of his photographs were. That is to say, there may be an Ellison picture or two that could be mistaken for a Parks in the same way that an average golfer playing against a pro could plausibly win a hole or two out of eighteen. It would be unfair to say that Ellison was imitating Parks, although their interests in the vicissitudes of post-war Harlem (such as its crumbling infrastructure) overlapped.
The common denominators between the books are Michal Raz-Russo (the programs director of the Gordon Parks Foundation) and John F. Callahan, listed as the co-editors of Ralph Ellison: Photographer and numbered among the essay contributors. Callahan is Ellison’s literary executor and is responsible for shepherding into print the vast sea of words through which Ellison is understood today, beyond the three books he published in his lifetime (Invisible Man, Shadow and Act, Going to the Territory). Callahan has edited The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995, expanded 2003), Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), and Juneteenth (1999) and co-edited Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000, with Albert Murray), Three Days Before the Shooting . . . (2010, with Adam Bradley), and The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison (2019, with Marc C. Conner).
Callahan’s essay in Ralph Ellison: Photographer is useful for theorizing Ellison’s approach, especially with respect to his many urban street scenes. Intriguingly, Callahan views James Joyce as an influence on Ellison’s photography, writing:
One of the artists Ralph Ellison considered his close ancestor was James Joyce. Ellison loved Joyce’s original, never-to-be-tamed vernacular Irish tongue, and was inspired by Joyce to adapt to his photography what Richard Ellmann called “the justification of the commonplace.” Speaking with acuity about Dubliners and Ulysses, Ellmann praised Joyce as “the first to endow an urban man of no importance with heroic consequence.”
Callahan extends Ellmann’s insight about Joyce to a photograph of a man whom he cleverly notes resembles the description of the character Tod Clifton in Invisible Man. (What if there were a book of photographs by Joyce of 1904 Dublin?)
While Joyce is surely in the background of Ellison’s interest in photography, there is not really a record of Ellison’s specifically photographic influences. He owned numerous how-to books but none on prominent photographers. (His library is now in the Library of Congress.) Ralph Ellison: Photographer is silent about his opinions on other photographers; it does not mention his disparaging remarks in a 1959 letter about Carl Van Vechten’s famous (and by then decades-old) photographs of leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Did Ellison ever pick up the Daily News to check out Weegee’s memorable shots of New York City crime scenes and daily life in the middle of the century? Whether he did or did not is lost to history, along with any comprehensive sense of which photographers he did or did not admire. Adam Bradley, one of the book’s contributors, is probably correct when he claims that Parks was Ellison’s “closest and most direct influence” in terms of photography, pointing out that “Ellison’s images share with Parks’s work a quality of photographic gaze that rejects the objectification of their subjects.”
The first time the public learned of Ellison’s skill as a photographer was probably in Trading Twelves (2000), his letter exchange with Albert Murray, which includes six of Ellison’s photographs. In these letters, which are mostly about literature, music, and current happenings in their lives, Murray and Ellison also discuss cameras and lenses. Murray was a photographer too, although never a professional like Ellison. Some of his photographs of jazz musicians can be found in Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues (2016).
Scholars such as Sara Blair and Michael Germana have intriguingly explored aspects of Ellison’s photographic practice, but Ralph Ellison: Photographer is the first book to offer a chronological sense of its various phases, from his professional portraits in the 1940s to playful Polaroid shots of the 1970s—two sets of work generally not comparable in terms of composition and execution. Among the better Polaroids are nicely backlit shots of flowers, images of Riverside Drive from his apartment in each of the four seasons, some plates of food (prefiguring the age of social media), bookcases, televisions, and other stuff around the house, including weirdly off-center bowls of fruit.
The carefully composed photographs from the 1940s and ’50s include portraits of Langston Hughes, Beatrice Steegmuller, Albert Erskine, Stanley Edgar Hyman (Shirley Jackson’s husband), Mozelle Murray (Mrs. Albert Murray), and quite a few of Ellison’s second wife, Fanny. These are interspersed with anonymous subjects, such as a woman contemplating a snifter of dark liquor and a boy earnestly holding up a bottle full of little fish.
There are shots of Harlem that could be mistaken for London or Berlin around the same year, supporting Ellison’s claim in his essay “Harlem Is Nowhere” (1948/64) that “Harlem is a ruin” as well as his caption to a Parks photograph in which he calls Harlem “a physical ruin that for many represents a psychological maze.” Thirty years before Howard Cosell announced that “the Bronx is burning,” Ellison documented the disintegration of an earlier era’s buildings taking place only a few miles north of the center of the economic engine that powered the Marshall Plan.
He had an eye for Harlem’s ruins.
He had an eye for Harlem’s ruins, but the reader is given less of a sense of his eye for the ancient world’s. The book contains very few images from his two years as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome (1955–57), when he also traveled to Japan and Mexico, snapping shots all the while. One photograph in the book is identified as being taken in Florence, and there are a handful of others of unidentified Italian street scenes. Ellison wrote to Murray in 1956 that “some of the Venice stuff came out quite well, both in Kodachrome and Anscochrome.” It’s too bad none of the Venice stuff is in the book. The only color plates in the book are of Polaroids, so whatever Ellison was doing with Kodachrome and Anscochrome will have to be left to the specialists or enthusiasts for now. A scholar specializing in these years of Ellison’s life tells me there are “almost a thousand snapshots from the Rome period.”
Ralph Ellison: Photographer provides what could be called a representative selection, but the 132 images here comprise less than 1 percent of his extant photographic oeuvre. One essay cites the number of Polaroids alone at 1,261, but only forty were included in the book. A few other photographs by Ellison also appear in the 2016 Ellison–Parks book, as well as in Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007). A great shot by Ellison of Shirley Jackson playing with her daughter appears in Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life of 2016. (Jackson was perhaps the only beneficiary of both of Ellison’s sidelines—he also helped install the sound system in her home.)
Spending some time with Ralph Ellison: Photographer will be a rewarding experience for anyone interested in Ellison and/or mid-century New York City. It is a welcome addition to the Ellison shelf so devotedly curated by John F. Callahan. At the same time, it is a missed opportunity because of the many photographs it omits. (Arnold Rampersad, as cited by Callahan, mentions a portrait Ellison took of Shirley Jackson, which she admired. Why mention it then omit it?) The book will also appear physically larger than it really is—most of the verso pages between 50 and 192 have been left blank.
Considering that Ellison took so many more photographs than are included here, one can hope that this book will create demand for a less selective follow-up, providing a more thorough sense of what he was seeing as he was writing. I would like to someday see those pictures he refers to here, in a 1986 letter:
We have . . . a view of the Hudson River from every window of our eighth floor apartment and thus were able to spend a glorious day watching the tall masted vessels course up the George Washington Bridge and down again with sails, emblems, and bright banners proudly astream in the wind [in celebration of the Statue of Liberty]. We watched and took photographs for hours and ended the day with a feeling of having relived a graceful moment of a not always graceful past.
