Ralph Ellison’s papers in the Library of Congress include hundreds of photographs that the novelist took over many years, mostly as a serious amateur and also, for a brief period in the late 1940s, as an aspiring professional. They range from the striking black-and-white studies of street life in Harlem that he made when he was in his thirties to elegant Polaroid images of flowers and still lifes from his later years. They aren’t great photographs. But they fascinate nonetheless, as the record of a modern literary giant’s romance with a quintessentially modern visual medium. Now there’s a beautifully produced book, Ralph Ellison: Photographer, which for the first time makes a generous selection of this work easily available.
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