Black Art Matters
The Enduring Legacy of Gordon Parks
Travel down memory lane with one of the greatest photographers of all time
In photographer Gordon Parks’ 1971 book Born Black, members of the Black Panther Party pose at their headquarters in Berkley, California; the Fontenelle family battles poverty; and men from the Fruit of Islam run drills with their arms outstretched in powerful black and white photos. The collection of images and essays commissioned by Life magazine, where Parks was the first African American staff photographer, covers critical moments and figures from 1960–1970, including Muhammad Ali’s 1966 fight with Londoner Henry Cooper and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 funeral.
The late Parks was a celebrated filmmaker, musician, and artist. Much of his work centered on Black life, with all its beauty and adversity. Parks spent time with his subjects, which ranged from gang leaders to Black activists and families struggling to make ends meet. He learned how they lived and what they valued in an attempt to capture their truths. Often, those images brought significant issues such as racism and violence to the forefront. A deep well of his groundbreaking images, books, and films can be found online in the Gordon Parks Foundation’s archive.
What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it.—The Photographs of Gordon Parks, 1983
But there’s more to Parks’ photography than activism. Photography lovers in Chicago at least can see some of his lesser-known work up close via the Home in the Wilderness exhibition at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago.
The exhibit features photos from Parks’ 1953 Life magazine assignment, “Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church” and “The Learning Tree” series from 1963. It “captures the euphoric and solemn complexities of religious life,” according to the gallery’s release.
Michal Raz-Russo, the Gordon Parks Foundation’s programs director, said Parks typically explored the theme of faith “both religious and more conceptual, broad ideas of faith in all of its manifestations and iterations.”
