About

Hey.  Stayc here.  I’m an educator, resident know-it-all, concerned human, daughter, grand-daughter, niece, sister, fiance, and child of God.  But most of all I am loved.  I love to write.  I love to read.  And, I hope that this blog gives you a chance to pick my brain. 

About the picture… 

Gordon Parks, Man Peeking from Manhole, Harlem , 1949
Courtesy of the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas

Ralph Ellison lived at photographer Gordon Parks’s home during a portion of the time he spent writing Invisible Man. In a series of photographs, some of which were published in Life in 1952 upon the publication of Ellison’s novel, Parks offered visual interpretations of important scenes in the book. This photograph, however, does not really depict anything in the novel, nor does the version of it that appeared in Life . Although the narrator of Ellison’s work does go down a manhole, he does not come back up; instead, he narrates the text from the limbo of his underground retreat. Thus, these photos offer an optimistic supplement to the text: they anticipate the invisible man’s emergence , and in this vein the commentary below the Life photograph takes care to note that the narrator withdraws from society “temporarily.” Several versions of the photo exist, with varying titles such as “Man Emerging: Harlem” and “ Invisible Man Enacted.” The titles are designed to direct the viewer’s understanding of the images and to obscure (1) the ambiguity of static photographs that could just as easily be viewed as a man lowering himself into the street and (2) the fact that the emergence depicted is never “enacted” in the novel. This concern to direct an optimistic reading of Ellison’s deeply ambivalent novel is typical of the novel’s critical reception, which has tended to want to rescue Ellison from the deterministic pessimism of his predecessor, Richard Wright.