Harlem in Images and Criticism: Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, and Social Space

• In Event: Spaces of Dissent

Abstract

Despite having only two collaborative projects, one of which is considered “lost,” the photographer Gordon Parks and novelist/critic Ralph Ellison continued to engage in forms of aesthetic and social criticism, particularly criticism that engaged the problem of “space.” This paper poses that between Ralph Ellison and Gordon Parks emerged a version of documentary practice that poses a polyvalent relationship between photography and criticism. It argues in favor of a reconsideration of documentary practice as an aesthetic program and a social demand in a moment of political tension, particularly given the shift in the perception of photographic possibility in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It argues, with Bill Nichols, that documentary practice, with its narrative techniques, allegiance to photographic realism, and social desires, is necessarily produced historically in the moment of the emergence of modernist aesthetics. Ellison and Parks’s two collaborative projects, “Harlem is Nowhere” and “A Man Becomes Invisible,” images and writings from which were recently displayed at Chicago’s Art Institute, serve as case studies for a more significant aesthetic relationship. Parks’s works demonstrate a commitment to both modernist aesthetics and documentational realism; Ellison’s critical material from publications like Shadow and Act shows a common interest in accounting for social inequality in a genre of modernist-inflected literary and social criticism. Furthermore, both of these practitioners demonstrate an ongoing commitment to revising social and aesthetic space, particularly given their studies of Harlem as “Nowhere”; this paper will also consider how photographic and literary-critical considerations of space mutually determine each other.

Author

• Megan R Tusler, University of Chicago