NYAB Event - "Contact: Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison, and “Invisible Man” Exhibition

"Contact: Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison, and “Invisible Man” Exhibition

Howard Greenberg Gallery

This event has ended.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gordon Parks, widely recognized as the most influential African American photographer of the 20th century, Howard Greenberg Galley in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation will present two simultaneous exhibitions of his work. Most noteworthy in the exhibitions will be a number of color prints from "Segregation Story," 1956, a limited edition portfolio with an essay by Maurice Berger. On exhibition for the first time, they were produced in 2012 from a group of transparencies only recently discovered in a storage box at the Gordon Parks Foundation.

"Contact: Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison, and “Invisible Man,” curated by the artist Glenn Ligon, examines a series of works by Gordon Parks entitled "Invisible Man." Many were first published in Life magazine upon the release of Ralph Ellison's award winning novel, which explored racial and social issues facing African Americans in the 20th century. A milestone in American literature, the novel is narrated by a black man who feels socially invisible. The exhibition includes the gelatin silver print "The Invisible Man, Harlem, New York, 1952," a striking image of a man peering out from underneath a manhole cover in the middle of a deserted street.

As Ligon notes, “The photos for 'Invisible Man' veered back in forth between an attempt to illustrate some of the feverish scenes in the novel and the “reality” of Harlem, which Parks had tried to document in his previous work. Indeed, many of the photos in the exhibition were seemingly created in relationship to Parks’ photo assignments in Harlem, not as illustrations for the novel, although it is hard to distinguish between the two. It is the tension between these motives—to illustrate a fiction and to document a reality—that is the basis of this exhibition.”

[Image: Gordon Parks "The Invisible Man, Harlem, New York" (1952) gelatin silver print © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery]