Gordon Parks made this photograph to illustrate an article for Life magazine that excerpted scenes from Ralph Ellison’s acclaimed novel Invisible Man. This photograph combines Parks’s talent for staging a scene with his mastery of gritty, black-and-white photojournalism. He used dramatic yet realistic lighting and a sharp focus on the protagonist emerging from underneath a manhole cover to powerfully visualize Ellison’s study of the status of African Americans in 1950s America.