CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/1/2023

'Ralph Ellison: Photographer' from Steidl

“Untitled (Mozelle Murray),” (1940s) is from Ralph Ellison: Photographer, the first book to collect the noted American writer’s photographs. Spanning from the 1930s to the 1990s, these include snapshots and Polaroids, landscapes, still lifes, portraits and scenes of Black life. “For Ellison, photography, much like writing, permitted him to investigate alternative methods of representing Black life and its ‘blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams’ that argued its centrality to American culture,” Michal Raz-Russo writes. “Twenty years after he wrote those lines, in his eulogy for [Romare] Bearden, Ellison referred to both the artist and himself when he concluded that the only way to express the ‘complex sense of American and Afro-American variety and diversity, discord and unity’ was to draw on the unique lived experience of the self and thereby ‘confront and impose [one’s] own artistic sense of order upon the world.’ The camera proved a useful tool for him to create field notes as well as find his ‘sense of order.’ In a 1956 letter to fellow writer Albert Murray requesting advice on purchasing new 35mm photographic equipment, Ellison underlined its importance: ‘You know me, I have to have something between me and reality when I’m dealing with it most intensely.’”