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GORDON PARKS (1912 - 2006)
Untitled (from
Harlem is Nowhere
)
.
Silver print, 1948. 241x191 mm; 9
1
/
2
x7
1
/
2
inches, full margins.
With—RALPH ELLISON, contact sheet of 12 images, 1948. Signed in pencil on the verso.This sheet
includes another view of the same alley (see upper center image).
Provenance: Deba Patnaik; private collection, NewYork.
In 1948, Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison collaborated on a photojournalism project, the subject of
which was the LaFargue Psychiatric Clinic in Harlem. Ellison, no stranger to photography, developed
the shooting script.The two men roamed Harlem, making images for what Ellison believed would
make for “something new in photojournalism.” They intended on its publication in
Magazine of
theYear, 1948
, which did not come to fruition. Instead, Parks’s photographs were then published in
Life
magazine. Ellison’s unpublished essay until 1964,
Harlem is Nowhere
, is considered by many to
presage
Invisible Man
. Prior to writing, Ellison, too, took photographs of the area, through which he
analyzed the setting of the psychiatric hospital as a lens towards the conscious of African Americans
living in Harlem: “To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a
labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses
of churches and clutter under foot with garbage and decay. Harlem is a ruin—many of its ordinary
aspects...are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams, and which, like
muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with hidden and threatening significance.
Yet this is no dream but the reality of well over four hundred thousand Americans; a reality which
for many defines and colors the world. Overcrowded and exploited politically and economically,
Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.” Ellison
pp. 295-296.
[5,000/7,000]