INFO ON WORK:
The book 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison represents a watershed in the canon of American fiction. Winner of the National Book Award in 1953, the novel has been hailed as one of the first to treat the black experience in twentieth-century America as a full human experience. Soon after its publication, Parks set out to evoke passages from the novel by shooting a series of images of an actor on the streets of Harlem, where Ellison had lived for more than a decade.
“I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century,” the narrator of Invisible Man tells readers, and the most memorable photograph from the series shows Parks’ actor mimicking the symbolic condition of living underground. Parks set his camera nearly flat on the pavement to frame the man’s head as he peers out from a manhole. Annotated test prints reveal Parks’ working method and his technical expertise; he decided to strongly burn in the top and bottom of a cropped frame, and give part of the emerging man’s face and the air above him an expressive glow.