Mid-Century Harlem, in Text and Images

Throughout the 1940s, the writer Ralph Ellison and the photographer Gordon Parks were both invested in artistic portrayals of Harlem that pushed back against the sensationalized image of the neighborhood that had taken hold in the decade after the Harlem Renaissance. Ellison’s Harlem-based novel, Invisible Man, won the Booker Prize in 1953; Parks’ documentary photography examined unseen facets of American poverty, and he was the first African-American to produce and direct major films.

Harlem brought them together. In 1952, Parks and Ellison collaborated on a feature for Life magazine called “A Man Becomes Invisible.” Released just after Ellison’s Invisible Man, the three-page spread placed Gordon’s artistic vision alongside the tropes of Ellison’s novel: racial injustice, identity, and state of the individual at society’s edges.