Ralph Ellison: Photographer by Michal Raz-Russo and John F. Callahan (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Ralph Ellison: Photographer by Michal Raz-Russo and John F. Callahan
• Lauren Walsh

Michal Raz-Russo and John F. Callahan, with contributions by Adam Bradley and Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. Ralph Ellison: Photographer. Göttingen: Steidl, 2022. 239 pp. $60.00.

Ralph Ellison, who is often characterized as the author of one of the greatest twentieth-century American novels, Invisible Man, spoke these words in a conversation (titled “A Completion of Personality”) with the writer John Hersey: “I might conceive of a thing aurally, but to realize it you have to make it vivid. . . . That is the condition of fiction, I think. Here is where sound becomes sight and sight becomes sound.”

For decades, critics have described Ellison as not only a masterful word-smith but a “thinker-tinker,” the descriptor itself borrowed from Invisible Man, a self-attributed moniker offered in the Prologue by the narrator. Ellison was a thinker who grappled with history, race, sociology, culture, and so much more; and he was also a tinkerer with hi-fi audio, photography, computers, and beyond. In fact, to label him simply a “tinkerer” is an under-statement, as a new book by the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust in partnership with the Gordon Parks Foundation and German publishing house Steidl makes clear. Ralph Ellison: Photographer (copyright 2022, released in April 2023), a lush publication with nearly 150 rarely-before-seen photos by Ellison himself, opens a new way of viewing how this inimitable author perceived the world around, offering insight into Ellison’s literary approach and, more broadly, his artistic vision of American life.

As Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. explains in the Foreword, Ellison and the vaunted photographer Gordon Parks were friends and sometimes collaborators, each influencing the other’s outlook and output. They joined forces [End Page 251] together on two projects, which became the basis for a 2016 exhibition (with a superb catalog), “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem,” at the Art Institute of Chicago. That exhibition was curated by Michal Raz-Russo, the Gordon Parks Foundation programs director, and it paved the way toward Ralph Ellison: Photographer, which was overseen by Raz-Russo with John F. Callahan, Ellison’s literary executor. Both Raz-Russo and Callahan, alongside the Gordon Parks Foundation’s executive director Kunhardt and literary critic Adam Bradley, have meaningful essays in this book.

These four individuals help frame the photographs; their contextualizing texts give background and set-up to understanding the images that appear in the subsequent pages. As Kunhardt writes, “Over careers that spanned more than half a century, through their words and pictures Ellison and Parks shared the goal of representing Black life as integral to, not separate from, the breadth of American culture.” Callahan adds that in response to Richard Wright’s book 12 Million Black Voices, Ellison admitted “ ‘brooding over the photographs . . . reading it [the book] and experiencing the pictures.’ At length he simply declared, ‘We are not the numbed, but the seething’—a remarkable affirmation of his unguarded, vulnerable writer’s response to the pitch of emotion aroused in him by the art of photography.”

After establishing Ellison’s interest in photography, his connection to evolving movements in social, literary, and artistic spaces, and his desire to capture a vision of Black American life that pushed back on dominant narratives, the book segues to the photos themselves, an arrangement curated in two parts: the first, Ellison’s photos from the 1940s and ’50s, including portraiture and street photography; and second, his images from the 1970s until his death in 1994, more heavily focused on his private space in Manhattan and almost exclusively Polaroids.

All told, the book encompasses the breadth of an advanced amateur photographer over decades, including black-and-white and color photography, 35mm, medium- and large-format work, and of course Polaroid, in addition to a small selection of images from a brief period when Ellison worked as a professional freelance photographer (often creating author portraits for book jackets, from approximately 1948 to 1950).

This is a proper photo book insofar as it is beautifully designed and sumptuously printed. Specific images beckon the eye: There is a crowd of...