—This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

Ralph Ellison, author of the award-winning 1952 novel “Invisible Man” and the posthumously published “Juneteenth,” long has been celebrated as a writer, teacher and consummate cultural critic of jazz, African American literature and the blues.

But Ellison was a polymath, possessed of a wide range of interests and talents. He studied music at Tuskegee, apprenticed in sculpture as a young newcomer to New York and gathered street game lyrics from children in Harlem for the Federal Writers’ Project. He loved technology and design — and he was an accomplished photographer.

For a brief time before the success of “Invisible Man,” Ellison earned money as a freelance photographer. He took portraits for publishers and covered events for newspapers, from car accidents to dog shows. He continued to work artistically, documenting everyday pursuits and beauties of Manhattan life. He collaborated with Gordon Parks and shot images of literary friends like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. He created intimate portraits of his wife, Fanny Ellison, and images of African Americans shopping and gathering together. He took pictures of children in the parks and on street corners.

By the 1960s, he was captivated by Polaroids. He made still-life studies of modernist furniture, African artwork, computers, the television, plants and flowers, bookshelves and other objects in his apartment on Riverside Drive.

The Ralph Ellison Papers in the Library’s Manuscript Division contain documentation about his photographic equipment and assignments. Visual holdings in the Ellison collection in the Prints and Photographs Division, meanwhile, include over 23,000 images dating from circa 1930 to 1990 — nearly 300 of which have been digitized and are available online. The 2023 photo book, “Ralph Ellison: Photographer,” drew heavily on this collection.

The collection include pictures of the Ellisons in Manhattan and at their rural Massachusetts home, as well as a myriad of images that reveal to us Ellison’s unique visual conceptions from behind the camera’s eye — proof positive of his artistic imagination.

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