The Harlem riot of 1935 not only signaled the end of the Harlem
Renaissance; it made black America's cultural capital an icon for
the challenges of American modernity. Luring photographers
interested in socially conscious, journalistic, and aesthetic
representation, post-Renaissance Harlem helped give rise to
America's full-blown image culture and its definitive genre,
documentary. The images made there in turn became critical to the
work of black writers seeking to reinvent literary forms. "Harlem
Crossroads" is the first book to examine their deep, sustained
engagements with photographic practices.
Arguing for Harlem as a crossroads between writers and the
image, Sara Blair explores its power for canonical writers, whose
work was profoundly responsive to the changing meanings and uses of
photographs. She examines literary engagements with photography
from the 1930s to the 1970s and beyond, among them the
collaboration of Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava, Richard Wright's
uses of Farm Security Administration archives, James Baldwin's work
with Richard Avedon, and Lorraine Hansberry's responses to civil
rights images. Drawing on extensive archival work and featuring
images never before published, Blair opens strikingly new views of
the work of major literary figures, including Ralph Ellison's
photography and its role in shaping his landmark novel "Invisible
Man," and Wright's uses of camera work to position himself as a
modernist and postwar writer. "Harlem Crossroads" opens new
possibilities for understanding the entangled histories of
literature and the photograph, as it argues for the centrality of
black writers to cultural experimentation throughout the twentieth
century.
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