Gordon Parks: "A Man Becomes Invisible"

The only published evidence of the sustained collaboration between Parks and Ellison is the three-page photo story “A Man Becomes Invisible,” included in the August 25, 1952 issue of Life. The magazine’s editors included only four of Parks’s most fantastical images as part of a regular feature called “Speaking of Pictures,” which offered a space for photographic reporting with a creative bent. Notably, two additional features by Parks appear in the same issue: a four-page spread on Alexander Calder’s colorful sculptural mobiles and a three-page fashion shoot titled “Campus Come-Ons,” the latter in fact the cover story.

For this website, passages from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) have been paired photographs by Gordon Parks taken for the Life August 1952 story "A Man Becomes Invisible."

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me."

“Now, aware of my invisibility, 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 point now is that I found a home—or a hole in the ground, as you will. . . . Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.

Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action."

“My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. . . . In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know.

Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible."

“This really was Harlem, and now all the stories which I had heard of the city-within-a-city leaped alive in my mind. . . . For me this was not a city of realities, but of dreams.”

“A flash of red and gold from a window filled with religious articles caught my eye. And behind the film of frost etching the glass I saw two brashly painted plaster images of Mary and Jesus surrounded by dream books…. I passed on to a window decorated with switches of wiry false hair, ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. “You too can be truly beautiful,” a sign proclaimed. “Win greater happiness with whiter complexion. Be outstanding in your social set.”

I hurried on, suppressing a savage urge to push my fist through the pane.”

“For now I had begun to believe… that there was a magic in spoken words. Sometimes I sat watching the watery play of light upon [Frederick] Douglass’s portrait, thinking how magical it was that he had talked his way from slavery to a government ministry, and so swiftly. Perhaps, I thought, something of the kind is happening to me. What had his true name been? Whatever it was, it was as Douglass that he became himself, defined himself. And not as a Boatwright as he’d expected, but as an orator. Perhaps the sense of magic lay in the unexpected transformations.”

“I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”

“It works, I thought. They see the hat, not me. There is a magic in it. It hides me right in front of their eyes. . . . If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?”

“I looked at Ras on his horse and at their handful of guns and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.”

“I went into the crowd, walking slowly, smoothly into the dark crowd, the whole surface of my skin alert, my back chilled, looking, listening to those moving with a heaving and sweating and a burr of talk around me… feeling them, a dark mass in motion on a dark night, a black river ripping through a black land…. Moving on through the sound of sirens and burglar alarms to be swept into a swifter crowd and pushed along, half-running, half-walking…. I moved, feeling as though a huge force was on the point of bursting.”

“Perhaps that’s my greatest social crime, I’ve overstayed my hibernation, since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.

“Ah,” I can hear you say, “so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!” But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"