Sara Blair. Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Year 2007, Issue: 25, 87 - 97, 01.04.2007

Clifford Endres

Abstract

text—the combination of word and image in a book. In 1941 Wright produced, with Edwin Rosskam as photographic editor, the photo-text Black Voices full title: Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States . This book drew heavily on the documentary files of the FSA but, because Wright reads the images differently, may be seen as a critical response to James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published several months earlier to popular acclaim. Wright would use his own photographs for a 1954 photo essay on blacks in Ghana, Black Power. Ellison too was a photographer, supporting himself with his camera work during the mid-1940s to the early 1950s while writing Invisible Man. He did not publish the photojournalistic essay on Harlem which he composed in collaboration with Gordon Parks “Harlem is Nowhere” , but his large archive of images indicates clearly that photography was for him an important means of critical reflection on American culture. As for Hughes, not only did he accompany Henri Cartier-Bresson on photographic forays in Mexico, but, with Roy DeCarava, brought out a best-selling photo- text, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, in 1955