Adam Bradley: My name is Adam Bradley. I’ve written extensively about the life and literature of Ralph Ellison. He was the author of 1952’s Invisible Man, a novel that came to epitomize understanding of race and identity in the United States, grappling with the individual in relation to the community.
Gordon Parks’s image Emerging Man offers a clear portrait of that space that we find Ellison’s unnamed protagonist at the end of Invisible Man, neither fully underground, nor fully above ground, in between. Ellison begins his novel with a prologue, an introductory section that sets the tone and the theme of the work. It describes one of the settings in the book, where the main character has found himself into an abandoned basement. Invisible Man is transformed by the time we get to the end, and he is ready, he says, to take the next step above ground to become an active participant in the world.
Ellison and Parks shared a kinship as artists. Parks increasingly came to see the importance of the written word in his own work. And Ellison was an avid photographer.
Parks’s image gives a face to the faceless figure of Invisible Man. In particular, it focuses on the quality of imagination that Ellison endowed his protagonist with so powerfully in the book. Ellison was invested in creating a character who had the capacity to imagine new possibilities for himself and for the nation.