SUNDAY REVIEW / NEW YORK TIMES PHOTO OUTTAKES OF AUTHOR JAMES BALDWIN.

1972: Author James Baldwin posed for photographs in an apartment
on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Frame 19 (upper left)
was the image that editors chose for publication. 

Proof sheet photos: Jack Manning, NYT. 

GUEST BLOG / By Rachel L. Swarns, writer, The New York Times--He is pensive. Quizzical. Amused. Then, suddenly, there’s that wide grin, that light-up-your-face laugh. That single shot of James Baldwin — Frame 19, above — landed on the culture pages of The New York Times in 1972. 

But NYT photographer Jack Manning took many, many more pictures that day. After more than four decades, NYT editors are finally publishing some of the most interesting outtakes. The sheet above includes 23 frames of Mr. Baldwin in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as the writer and expatriate spent some time in New York on his way home to France after a fund-raising trip for the activist Angela Davis. 

Mr. Baldwin was discussing his new collection of essays, “No Name in the Street”; his disillusionment with the civil rights movement; his writer’s block; and the illness that kept him bedridden for months with what he said his “friends thought was hepatitis, but with something I thought was psychological.” 

The wide-ranging interview appeared in an article published on June 26, 1972. But what captures us today in these close-ups is his face, the wide eyes, the lined forehead, the mouth frozen midsentence, the cigarette caught between his fingers, the evocative expressions that shift from frame to frame. 

For years, Mr. Baldwin felt uncomfortable with his looks. His stepfather made fun of him when he was growing up, ridiculing his “frog eyes” and calling him the ugliest boy he had ever seen. Mr. Baldwin internalized that view of himself: “I had absolutely no reason to doubt him,” he wrote in 1976 in his book-length essay, “The Devil Finds Work.” 

“This judgment,” Mr. Baldwin continued, “was to have a decidedly terrifying effect on my life.” Over time, he learned that not everyone shared that view. Mr. Baldwin electrified readers in the 1950s and ’60s with a searing series of books and essays on race in America, including “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Notes of a Native Son,” “Nobody Knows My Name” and “The Fire Next Time.” 

People knew him not as the man with “frog eyes,” but as a writer of passion and power. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor, was 14 when he came across “Notes of a Native Son.” It was the first time he had ever read a book by a black writer, “the first time I had heard a voice capturing the terrible exhilaration and anxiety of being a person of African descent in this country,” 

Dr. Gates wrote in an article about Mr. Baldwin’s legacy for The New Republic. Dr. Gates finally met Mr. Baldwin at his home in France in 1973, just a year or so after Mr. Manning shot these photographs for The Times. “People said Baldwin was ugly; he himself said so,” Dr. Gates wrote in 1992. “But he was not ugly to me. There are faces that we cannot see simply as faces because they are so familiar, so iconic, and his face was one of them.”