Emerging Man, Harlem, New York,

1952

After becoming Life magazine’s first black staff photographer in 1947, Parks produced a series of groundbreaking photo-essays, including “A Man Becomes Invisible,” which promoted Ralph Ellison’s recent novel Invisible Man. This is one of several scenes Parks staged of the unnamed narrator emerging through a manhole on a street in Harlem—a place that for Ellison represented “the scene and symbol of the
Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.” The imagined episode is only hinted at in the book’s epilogue as the conflicted narrator prepares to leave his underground sanctuary. Although not included in the three-page Life story, Emerging Man captures the surreal and nightmarish character of Ellison’s novel, which addresses the psychological damage inflicted by racism on African Americans.