The Brooklyn Rail

Invisible Man, the eponymous narrator of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, calls himself a “thinker-tinker”: a tinker because he likes to invent things, and a thinker because his inventions have “a theory and a concept” behind them. His greatest innovation is wiring the ceiling of his basement home with 1,396 lightbulbs, which he powers with stolen electricity. Light gives him form and thus life (“to be unaware of one’s form,” he says, “is to live a death”); making, in a sense, keeps him alive.

Ellison, like his character, was both a thinker and a maker. He tinkered with words, of course, but he also tried his hand at a wide variety of crafts: he played the trumpet; he built audio amplifiers; he was an early adopter of the personal computer. He also took photographs. These photographs are the subject of the recent book Ralph Ellison: Photographer, published by Steidl in partnership with the Gordon Parks Foundation and the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust. While the pictures never approach the level of mastery that Ellison’s writing achieved, as photography was his hobby, not his vocation, they provide insight into Ellison’s life and his curious, tinkering mind.

Ellison first dabbled in photography while an undergraduate at the Tuskegee Institute, where he was studying music—having planned, before he became a writer, to pursue a career as a symphony composer. He didn’t graduate from Tuskegee: after his junior year, he moved to New York City to seek summer employment, and ended up staying for the rest of his life.

In New York, Ellison turned his attention to writing, while continuing to take pictures on the side. His creative pursuits led him to Harlem’s vibrant art scene, where he met Gordon Parks, the Life Magazine photojournalist. Parks was a photographer-writer, Ellison a writer-photographer: the two men shared with each other the tricks of their respective trades, and collaborated on several projects.

Parks’s influence is evident in Ralph Ellison: Photographer. The book is divided into two time periods: the 1940s–50s, and the 1970s–90s. The early photographs are black-and-white and, like Parks’s, mostly of people. There are staged portraits: of Ellison’s wife, Fanny, playing cards and modeling in fashionable clothes; of Langston Hughes striking a dignified pose on a city street; and of other writers in Ellison’s set. Most of the photographs, however, are documentary: like Parks, Ellison often spent hours traipsing through the streets with a camera, looking for images to capture. In one such image, a boy holds a jar of minnows and stares bemusedly back at the camera. In another, four boys eat ice cream with their backs against the wall, wearing suits that don’t quite fit.

Ellison possessed some technical skill as a photographer, though, as Adam Bradley writes in one of the essays for the book, “no one would mistake [his] images for the work of a photographic master.” The compositions of his photographs often seem random, and some of the images are out of focus. More than that, the people in the pictures—their characters, their inner lives—often seem blurry. Ellison was a master of capturing inner experience in words, in part because writing allowed him to mix naturalism with surrealism. His photographs are bound to material reality, and, as a result, mostly fail to capture what Ellison called “the almost surreal state of our everyday American life.”

Occasionally, however, Ellison’s brilliant imagination shines clearly in his pictures. One image shows a woman lying on the ground, surrounded by unidentified feet. The photograph’s geometric composition and high contrast evoke fear, danger. But there’s a strange serenity on the woman’s face that creates a sense of dissonance. Ellison suggests not just one inner reality, but multiple, colliding ones: the woman’s, the photographer’s, the viewer’s.

In 1967, his family’s summer house burned down, taking with it the draft of Ellison’s second novel. After the fire, the traumatized author started taking Polaroids of his daily life. Unlike his earlier photographs, these snapshots are mostly of things, not people: houseplants, dinners on trays, a blurred television broadcasting a football game. In some, Ellison arranges strange compositions with materials found around his home: babydoll heads, seashells, electronics, pots and pans. Oddly, it is these photographs that seem most to approach the vision of Ellison the writer, and to reveal something about the inner human experience. They provide a glimpse into Ellison’s life (he ate dinner; he watched football), but they also, in their specificity and strangeness, reveal something of his inner existence–and the “surreal state” of everyday life.

On the whole, however, Ellison’s photographic output is most interesting when considered in relation to the entirety of his creative practice. In his 1964 essay “On Becoming a Writer,” Ellison wrote about the ideal of the “Renaissance Man” to which he and his friends, as young Black boys in Oklahoma, had aspired. Despite the cards stacked against them, he wrote, “we felt that we … could be and do anything and everything which other boys did, and do it better.” Practicing photography, tinkering with computers, building, rebuilding, experimenting with no definite purpose—for Ellison, these were not just ways to pass the time, but assertions of personhood, of life.

Ellison liked to invent things. His inventiveness led him to write one of the great novels of the twentieth century; it also, in a sense, kept him alive.