Gordon Parks
“I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America—poverty, racism, discrimination,” Gordon Parks asserted. 1 Born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was the youngest of 15 children in a family deeply affected by the racial terror used to enforce Jim Crow segregation. Yet Parks’s experience of Black life in America ultimately straddled geographies, economic strata, and social circumstance.
When Parks lost his mother at 15, he moved from his small Kansas town to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with his sister. He was exposed to both urban and rural poverty and the racial hierarchies of the South and North: he survived an attempted lynching; endured a period of homelessness; composed a radio hit; worked as a waiter; toured with a semi-professional basketball team; played in a traveling orchestra; planted trees with the Civilian Conservation Corps; and became a father. After getting his first camera in 1937, Parks went to work as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, before becoming a regular contributor to Ebony and Vogue. In 1949, he became the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine; in 1969, he became the first African American to direct a major Hollywood film, The Learning Tree. Parks’s list of accomplishments stands as a testament to his skill and resourcefulness as a photographer, filmmaker, memoirist, novelist, choreographer, composer, and poet, but what is most remarkable is how these experiences shaped his powerfully humanizing vision.
Parks was an advocate for civil rights and tackled issues of race, poverty, and policing in America throughout his career. In his 1948 photo essay “Harlem Gang Leader,” Parks documents the life of 17-year-old Leonard “Red” Jackson with the hope of humanizing the individuals involved in Harlem gang wars and encouraging support for the community through social programs. 2 Throughout the 1960s, Parks reflected on the Civil Rights Movement; his portrait of Malcolm X at a Harlem rally positions the popular activist as a powerful figure between the people amassed before him and the state, symbolized by the fragmented flag to which he points. In 1971, Parks directed the blockbuster Shaft, which upends racial stereotypes in its portrayal of John Shaft, a Black hero detective who takes down white criminals. 3
In 1957, Parks was assigned to photograph for a series of articles addressing crime in the United States. With reporter Henry Suydam, Parks shot on the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, producing color images that evoke what Life described as “The Atmosphere of Crime.” From this larger body of work, 12 pictures were reproduced in the September 9 issue of Life. Shot with available light, figures become silhouettes; the soft haze of a hallway feels warm as a man raises his hands; a person’s legs lay bare the scars of poverty and addiction. Parks does not name or identify “the criminal,” but instead exposes what Nicole Fleetwood describes as “police work”—the policing practices that criminalize poverty and race. 4 Here, police work is rendered as violent and bureaucratic: detectives raid an apartment, attack a man in the hallway, file paperwork, speak on the radio, file more paperwork while we wait. The series speaks to a pivotal moment in a long history of policing in America that extends from the patrolling of enslaved people to this moment in 1957, shortly before Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on crime and the increasing militarization of the police. Considered today, Parks’s work on crime becomes a catalyst for reevaluating the intertwined histories of photography and criminality in the United States: a story of surveillance and racialized optics in which we are still entrenched.
The signs in Parks’s 1963 photograph Harlem Rally, Harlem, New York echo the refrain of protests against the police state and anti-Black racism then and now, during an unprecedented movement in defense of Black life: WE ARE LIVING IN A POLICE STATE / LIBERTY OR DEATH. The abolitionist call articulated within the frame reverberates across the photograph; the refrain repeats. 5 Today, Parks’s photographs offer the opportunity to reckon with the hard truths of our history.
By River Bullock, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, 2020
Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons (1966; repr., Minneapolis: Minneapolis Historical Society Press, 2010).
For an insightful analysis of the editorial process Parks’s images underwent in Life magazine, see Russell Lord, Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument (Pleasantville, NY: The Gordon Parks Foundation and The New Orleans Museum of Art with Steidl, 2013).
Maurice Berger, “’Shaft’? We’re Talking About Gordon Parks…and We Can Dig It” Race Stories, The New York Times, May 24, 2019, accessed June 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/lens/shaft-gordon-parks-photos.html
Nicole Fleetwood, “Policing and the Production of Crime” in Sarah Hermanson Meister, Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 (Pleasantville, NY: The Gordon Parks Foundation and Steidl, 2020).
For transformative thinking on the sonic potentials of photographs and the chorus, see Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018) and Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
- Introduction
- Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks (November 30, 1912 – March 7, 2006) was an American photographer, musician, writer and film director, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African-Americans—and in glamour photography.Parks was the first African American to produce and direct major motion pictures—developing films relating the experience of slaves and struggling black Americans, and creating the "blaxploitation" genre. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s (taken for a federal government project), for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the 1971 film Shaft. Parks also was an author, poet and composer.
- Wikidata
- Q365682
- Introduction
- Self-taught, Parks worked as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration from 1942-1943, Life Magazine from 1948-1961, where he was the first black staff photographer; and as a freelance fashion photographer. He directed films in the 1960s and 1970s including "The Learning Tree" and "Shaft," composed music, and was the author of several books, mostly memoirs.
- Nationalities
- American, African American
- Gender
- Male
- Roles
- Artist, Author, Film Director, Composer, Writer, Photographer
- Names
- Gordon Parks, Gordon Alexander Buchanan Parks, Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks
- Ulan
- 500019962
Exhibitions
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409: Gordon Parks and “The Atmosphere of Crime”
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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520: Picturing America
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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Making Faces: Images of Exploitation and Empowerment in Cinema
Oct 15, 2016–May 7, 2017
MoMA
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From the Collection:
1960–1969 Mar 26, 2016–Mar 19, 2017
MoMA
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One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North
Apr 3–Sep 7, 2015
MoMA
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Gordon Parks has
10 exhibitionsonline.
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Gordon Parks Children with Doll, Washington, D.C. 1942
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Gordon Parks Man with Straw Hat, Washington, D.C. 1942
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Gordon Parks A Harlem Scene, New York, NY 1943
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Gordon Parks Harlem Newsboy, Harlem, New York 1943
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Gordon Parks Fulton Fish Market Hooker, New York 1943
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Gordon Parks Harlem Gang Wars 1948
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Gordon Parks Red Jackson, Harlem Gang Leader 1948
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948
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Gordon Parks Emerging Man, Harlem, New York 1952
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Gordon Parks Arrested, Metropolitan Baptist Church, Chicago 1953
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Gordon Parks Gloria Vanderbilt, New York 1954
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Gordon Parks Raiding Detectives, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, New York, New York 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, New York, New York 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, New York, New York 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, New York, New York 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, New York, New York 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, New York, New York 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, New York, New York 1957
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Gordon Parks Raiding Detectives, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Crime Suspect with Gun, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Drug Search, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Police Raid, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Knifing Victim I, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Checking In Suspect, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Detectives Grilling a Suspect, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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Gordon Parks Untitled, Chicago, Illinois 1957
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