From portraits taken around Harlem in the 1940s to assignments for Life magazine to the 1963 March on Washington, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) wielded his camera as a tool for social justice. He captured civil rights activists like Malcom X and Martin Luther King, Jr. in addition to artists and celebrities such as Helen Frankenthaler and Ingrid Bergman. But he may be best known for his candid portraits of families and communities in the segregated South during the era of Jim Crow. All of these and more will be on view in Voices in the Mirror at Jack Shainman Gallery in mid-September, also marking the 20th anniversary of The Gordon Parks Foundation.
Parks was spurred to pursue photography in 1937 after seeing photos taken for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which held a mission to document American life. “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,” he said. “I knew at that point I had to have a camera.” In 1942, he became the first Black photographer hired as part of the initiative, introducing him to Washington, D.C., where he noted that “discrimination and bigotry were worse there than any place I had yet seen.”
Among the images included in Voices in the Mirror are seminal portraits like “American Gothic, Washington, D.C.” (1942), which captures a government worker named Ella Watson with a broom and mop. The work nods to American Regionalist painter Grant Wood’s likewise iconic “American Gothic” painting, created 12 years earlier as an ode to American values. Parks’ image represented a starkly contrasted reality.
After speaking with Watson about her life and experience in D.C., Parks recalled that it was “so disastrous that I felt that I must photograph this woman in a way that would make me feel—or make the public feel—about what Washington, D.C., was in 1942.” He positioned her in front of a flag with a symbolic mop and broom. “I didn’t care about what anybody else felt,” he said. “That’s what I felt about America and Ella Watson’s position inside America.”
The exhibition is accompanied by numerous anecdotes and reflections by some of those who appeared in the photos or had close relationships with those who did, such as Malcolm X’s daughter, Qubilah Shabazz, and Cora Taylor, who was one of the women standing near a pair of segregated water fountains in “Segregation in the South” (1956).
Voices in the Mirror opens on September 18 and continues through November 7 in New York. You might also be interested in the works of other FSA photographers who documented the South during the 1930s and 1940s, such as Russell Lee and Marion Post Wolcott.
