After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999-2000)

Many of Wall’s works are tinged with a certain melancholy, embodied by the lonely characters who flee the viewer’s gaze, as if lost in their thoughts, and in these indoor locations in which they adopt passive, idle postures. However, in After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999-2000), the melancholy of the figure sitting with his back turned to the camera is not merely the product of the photographer’s imagination, but rather that of the writer Ralph Ellison and his novel Invisible Man (1952). After rereading the book, Wall wanted to recreate the narrator’s home: a cellar in Harlem lit by hundreds of light bulbs – 1,369 to be precise – so that the man could write his story.

A vision which, despite the dreadful portrayal of social misery, also opens the way for magic and fantasy. Among the dirty dishes, piles of books, and hanging laundry, the anxiety-inducing chaos of the setting appears enchanting beneath the magical light of the myriad bulbs, with their almost comforting atmosphere. As a bibliophile and writer himself, the Canadian photographer was delighted to recreate the scene as he had pictured it while reading the book: ‘The process of creating this room, with its twisted floor, its color palette, and the turbulent flow of the light-bulb pattern was a sculptural endeavor which eventually led to the creation of a highly stimulating pictorial treatment.’