Gordon Parks' portrait of government worker Ella Watson is among the most renowned portraits in history, but few know that it was part of a larger body of work that will now be shown in a new book and exhibition.

Two new books and one expanded edition of the photographs of Gordon Parks look at the work of the famed photographer from three decades of his career: the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Taken together, the books show that Parks’ humanistic commitment to exposing the effects of race and class in America never wavered.

In American industrial hubs during World War II, what’s known as the “arsenal of democracy” rapidly manufactured the materials to support the Allied military efforts overseas. This largely invisible labor included a diverse workforce producing everything from steel and ammunition to the grease that lubricated tanks, airplanes, and weapons.

It has been more than 65 years since Gordon Parks came to Mobile to shoot photos for a Life Magazine article on segregation, but his work continues to reverberate. Just last week, the Gordon Parks Foundation honored a woman featured in one of those photos. The story spans decades, but the latest chapter began last year, when an exhibition of Parks’ iconic “Segregation Story” photos finally came to Mobile, courtesy of the Mobile Museum of Art.

In the late 1940s, Life magazine published a multipage photo spread titled "Harlem Gang Leader," depicting the gang wars that had taken control of the New York neighborhood. Through contemplative, yet often violent portraits of the gangs, photographer Gordon Parks captured the complexity and nuance of an area that was often misjudged.

At a time when the country is spinning in circles trying to make sense of race, ward off inhumanity and define social justice, Parks’s artistic heirs are uniquely positioned to shed light, offer guidance and question the status quo. They’re doing so with heartening audacity and blessed urgency.

How can it be that America’s greatest photographer produced a striking, original and insightful body of work highlighting an important aspect of the most dramatic event in the nation’s history and those pictures are almost unknown? Ironically, the photos were commissioned by one of the largest corporations in the world specifically for the purpose of promotion.

I noticed. I didn’t make much of it. The day care was closing. I walked over to Imani, took the blue-eyed white doll out of her hands, picked her up off the carpet, and raised her high. She frowned. I smiled. Her frown turned to a smile.

A photo on display at the Carnegie Museum of Art shows a dozen workmen looking out from a dingy freight elevator, their eyes trained directly at the camera. Their faces show resolve. The year is 1944 and these men work in the Pittsburgh Grease Works, a hulking operation that took up two whole blocks in the Strip District and was the largest lubrication manufacturing facility in the world.

To call Gordon Parks (1912–2006) a Renaissance man would be a massive understatement. A photographer, filmmaker, writer, musician/composer, and painter, Parks enjoyed an extraordinary career that landed him everywhere from Hollywood to the front lines in the battle for Civil Rights.

On May 19 in New York, art aficionados and art world figures gathered to celebrate successes and toast to the future with the Gordon Parks Foundation.

After two long years of virtual celebration, last night, the Gordon Parks Foundation’s annual gala has returned stronger than ever. At the height of evening traffic, art aficionados, curators, activists, and more entered the doors of Cipriani 42nd Street for a night celebrating social justice and the arts in the name of Gordon Parks.

Collection of 244 Works, Organized into 15 Study Sets, Advances Opportunities for Scholars and Students to Engage with Parks’s Legacy through Research, Exhibitions, and Multidisciplinary Curricula

Howard University has announced the acquisition of 252 photographs from The Gordon Parks Foundation. An acclaimed photographer, writer and musician, Parks was the first Black filmmaker to produce and direct major motion pictures. He’s credited with creating the “Blaxploitation” genre with classic films such as Shaft in 1971. Also, he was the first Black person to be a staff photographer at Life magazine.

Howard University and The Gordon Parks Foundation have announced a historic acquisition of 252 photographs representing the arc of Gordon Parks’s career over five decades. The breadth of the collection--which spans Parks’s earliest photographs in the 1940s through the 1990s--makes it one of the most comprehensive resources for the study of Parks’s life and work anywhere in the world. 

A group of 252 works spanning the influential Black photographer’s long career will be housed at the Washington HBCU’s research center.

In his 1956 segregation series, Parks paired Black women's elegance with pain. Their strength inspired me to discover my own.

Gordon Parks was the 15th of 15 children, grew up poor in rural Kansas when Jim Crow held sway, was on his own by the time he was 15, and at one point was playing piano in a brothel to get a few dollars in his pocket. Yet, despite these inauspicious beginnings, Parks became one of 20th-century America’s most accomplished Renaissance men.

An in-depth Carnegie Museum of Art exhibition of photography by Gordon Parks brings Pittsburghers inside a bustling grease plant — where your relatives may be waiting. The photos Parks took captured the difficulty of the work and quietly illustrated persisting labor divisions, including those that ran along racial lines. 

In the Midwest in the 1930s, Gordon Parks was a young railroad porter who would gather magazines that passengers left behind and study the photographs carefully.

He’d focus on images of migrant workers, taken by Farm Security Administration photographers documenting the social and economic plight of Americans during the Depression.

“I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,” Parks later recalled. “I knew at that point I had to have a camera.”

Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, the youngest of 15 children, Parks grew up on his family’s farm and then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with an older sister, leaving high school before graduation.

From photography by Gordon Parks to new watercolours by Madeline Hollander, the APAA (Association of Professional Art Advisors) share their top picks from the Frieze Los Angeles 2022 edition.

Celebrated for his documentary photography of civil rights issues and poverty throughout the United States, this work by Gordon Parks stands out for the considered composition and thoughtfulness captured on both subjects faces, and the architecture we find them in. 

Yale has acquired some of the Black photographer’s best-known images.

INDIVIDUALLY, THE PHOTOGRAPHS GORDON PARKS produced during his long and storied career are iconic: Ella Watson, Park’s own American Gothic, posed stoically in front an American flag with a broom and a mop; Muhammad Ali, up close, his head bowed in contemplation; an unnamed Black family in Shady Grove, Alabama, waiting for ice cream at the “colored” window. But taken together, says curator Melissa Barton, the impact is overwhelming. “It is so moving to be able to see all these photographs all at once,” she says. “It’s so powerful.”

Black history: These African American figures deserve to be celebrated.

There are a number of hidden heroes that are rarely discussed in classrooms, or around the dinner table, and while their names might not sound immediately familiar, these famous figures have shaped history and deserve the spotlight. 

A free community screening of the film “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks” is planned as part of Black History Month at the Oceanside Museum Of Art.

A wonderful assortment of extras pays tribute to Gordon Parks’s breakthrough film.

Based on Gordon Parks’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, The Learning Tree unfolds through the eyes of the teenage Newt (Kyle Johnson) as he experiences his first pangs of love and struggles to retain his self-respect and ideals in the face of rampant prejudice. While it’s hardly a radical film in its racial politics, the small-scale, deeply personal drama is compelling in its specificity whenever it homes in on the more quotidian aspects of black lives in rural America that, even today, are rarely glimpsed on screen.

Shaft, the pioneering blaxploitation film directed by Gordon Parks, came out fifty years ago. To commemorate the anniversary, Howard Greenberg Gallery has mounted an exhibition of Parks’s photographs from 1948 through ’67 that purportedly exemplify a “cinematic approach” to the medium and thus foretell the artist’s successful crossover. This conceptual framework is a slippery one—after all, the look of mainstream cinema changed dramatically over that period—but the curatorial gesture is nonetheless productive. Some purists might prefer to keep the artist’s exquisitely composed and carefully printed documentary photographs, many of which he created on assignment for Life magazine, separate from his later sojourn into popular entertainment. This show asks, at least in theory, what we might learn by reappraising the canonical in relation to the mass cultural.

Anthology Film Archives screens a near-complete retrospective of the photographer’s films, including the bio-pic “Leadbelly” and the private-eye thriller “Shaft.”

The photographer Gordon Parks was the first Black director to make a major-studio feature: “The Learning Tree,” from 1969, an autobiographical drama about growing up in Kansas in the nineteen-twenties. It’s screening in Anthology Film Archives’ near-complete retrospective of Parks’s films (through Dec. 11). Also included are the TV movie “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey,” the bio-pic “Leadbelly,” the personal documentary “Moments Without Proper Names,” and, of course, the Harlem-based private-eye thriller “Shaft.”

This documentary celebrates how the work of the great photographer Gordon Parks brought a nuanced fidelity to Black experience.

In one of Gordon Parks’ photographs from 1942, a Black woman named Ella Watson stands erect, staring wearily into the lens. Watson, a widow supporting herself and two grandchildren, is pictured at her place of employment, where she cleans offices. She holds an upright broom in one hand, a mop by the other, in a stance echoing Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” painting. Rather than a rural house behind her, offering support and shelter, she stands before an American flag — the symbol of a country that has slighted her.

Anderson Cooper speaks with LaToya Ruby Frazier and director John Maggio about the new film detailing the life of legendary photographer Gordon Parks.

For its 40th anniversary, the Howard Greenberg Gallery is exhibiting works from Parks’s time at Life magazine documenting the Black experience.

We’re living through a Gordon Parks renaissance. Parks achieved many firsts as an acclaimed Black photographer, writer, musician and film director, making him an obvious figure to celebrate as the art world reckons with racial injustice. 

Gordon Parks’s 1956 photograph of a Black woman and her child beneath a department store sign that reads COLORED ENTRANCE is famous for a reason. It is an elegant image, with a zigzag composition that carefully directs the eye, and yet it is also a painful one because it finds a way of rendering the structural racism of the American South so visibly.

Because this year marks the 50th anniversary of his groundbreaking 1971 film, “Shaft”; because two fine shows of his pioneering photojournalism are currently on view at the Jack Shainman galleries in Chelsea; because a suite from his influential 1957 series, “The Atmosphere of Crime,” is a highlight of “In and Around Harlem,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art; and because, somehow, despite the long shadow cast by a man widely considered the pre-eminent Black American photographer of the 20th century, he is too little known, the time seems right to revisit some elements of the remarkable life, style and undimmed relevance of Gordon Parks.
 

The Washington Post offers a beautiful and attentive review of Gordon Parks' new book of photography The Atmosphere of Crime: "Parks’s photographs present a more insightful, delicate and disinterested view. They remind us that an atmosphere is not the same as a narrative. One is complex, pervasive, inchoate and, like a fog, it can lift. The other is linear. Like an obsession, it keeps corkscrewing ahead, leaving all kinds of damage in its wake."

A.O. Scott of The New York Times discusses the context and the legacy of Gordon Parks' film The Learning Tree (1969). "The Learning Tree is something else...an absolutely personal film, entwined with its creator’s own experiences, that lays authoritative claim to a place in the American mainstream. At Life (and before that at the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration), Parks was known for his intensive, intimate portraits of housing projects, working-class neighborhoods and poor, rural towns, and there was always a risk, given the institutional whiteness of the Time Life Corporation, that those images could be misinterpreted as exotic. But his aesthetic rigor — the beauty and integrity of those images — ensured that Parks was doing more than explaining black life to white America. He was, like his exact contemporary Ralph Ellison (who grew up one state south of Parks, in Oklahoma, and who like Parks eventually went north) committed to the grand midcentury project of explaining America to itself.

A Review of Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950, currently on view at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

A look at how the photographer translated his humanistic view of urban crime to the silver screen.

Review of Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950 at the National Gallery of Art.

Study of Gordon Parks's photograph American Gothic.

Review of I Am You | Part 1 at Jack Shainman Gallery.