![]() When I happened to show Wall a copy of the August 1952 issue of Life , he was impressed at the achievement of Parks and Ellison. Nevertheless, as responses to the same text, the two versions share the essentials: a black man sequestered and self-absorbed in an illuminated room, depicted in such a way that he is both an individual and a metonym, or symbol. Everything to subsist is in that room, including the kitchen sink. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine a more detailed photograph-each and every one of the 1,369 bulbs specified by Ellison seems to be present, along with furniture, clothes, family photographs, and toiletries. It is much more detailed than the 1952 interpretation. Wall’s image took more than a year to complete. In 1999 the art photographer Jeff Wall read Invisible Man and, like Parks, was prompted to stage and photograph its prologue. Moreover, Parks was himself an accomplished writer-and later a painter, musician, and filmmaker-who moved with enviable ease between his talents. The episodic and vivid style of Ellison’s writing lends itself to still images, so it is unsurprising that a photographer might wish to respond to it. This is the place from which the narrator will recount his story. He is drinking sloe gin and listening to jazz records, surrounded by light bulbs he has connected illegally in order to banish the darkness. It shows the narrator holed up in a windowless cellar into which he has fallen during a riot. The final image-published only once-was an elaborately staged scene from the book’s prologue. The opening photograph, of a young man emerging from (or perhaps disappearing under) a manhole, is a striking if ambiguous symbol of black experience and often reproduced as such. Ellison himself helped out and Life published four of the results on August 25. Ellison’s good friend, Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks, was so impressed by the book he decided to create images illustrating some of its key moments. ![]() In the spring of 1952 Ralph Ellison published his novel Invisible Man, a revelatory account of what it was to be black in postwar America. What do we presume to be original? Why does art still put such a premium on originality while its advanced theories question the very idea? And what might this tell us about photography’s “applied” fields (documentary, journalism, illustration, fashion, and architectural photography, for example), in which originality is a lesser matter? Consider the following three very different examples. As a result, we are now more likely than ever to encounter precedents that may cause us to rethink our ideas about what is significant in contemporary photography and why. Photography’s rambling, unsystematic past is becoming increasingly available to us-not least the history of illustrated printed matter, which is now easily uploaded, accessed and bought via the Internet, and studied with growing intensity. First published in Aperture n.206, Spring 2012.
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