The big picture: the face of race relations in 1950s America

It’s American society, riven by racism, that cannot recognise his humanity due to the colour of his skin, even if he comes at it kicking and screaming.

A few months after the novel’s US publication, Ellison collaborated with the photographer Gordon Parks on a story for Life magazine that visualised scenes and ideas from the novel with a series of arresting black-and-white images. Ellison and Parks knew each other from Harlem and had worked together a few years earlier on a story about the neighbourhood, where the effects of racism and segregation were painfully evident. Ellison saw Harlem as “the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth”.

For the Life magazine article, Parks shot dozens of photographs around the neighbourhood using John Bates, a friend of Ellison’s, as his model. Some were in documentary mode; others were more constructed and surreal. Only four made it into print, and Ellison later lamented “the tremendous difficulty of translating such intensified and heightened prose images into those of photography. At best, the essay turned out to be an excellent ad.”

But this image of Bates emerging from a manhole, which features in a new book and exhibition on black photojournalism in postwar America, is a worthy complement to Ellison’s heightened prose, packing no less of a punch in its stripped-back simplicity. (A similar shot was later used by Penguin as a cover image for a UK edition of the novel.) The man’s body and part of his face may be invisible, swallowed up by the Harlem streets, but his eyes bore into us as he re-enters the world, fixing us with a gaze that no viewer can comfortably ignore. 

Black Photojournalism is on at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, until 19 January. An accompanying catalogue will be published by Artbook on 21 October

Photograph courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation