[Earlier this
year, I had the chance to visit an amazing photography exhibition at Boston’s
Musuem of Fine Arts: Gordon Parks: Back to Fort
Scott. In this series, I’ll use that exhibition as a starting point for
highlighting some of the many ways Parks’s career and life illuminate late 20th
century American history and culture. Add your thoughts, whether you’ve seen
the exhibition or not, in comments!]
Three projects
that represent three American stages in Parks’s iconic career.
1)
The Farm
Security Administration (FSA): In the early 1940s, Parks secured his first
steady photography gig, working for the influential Roy
Emerson Stryker in the Information Division of
the New Deal’s FSA. It was during this time that Parks created the
photograph that remains one of his most famous and powerful works, American
Gothic, Washington, D.C. (1942). In its connections of work and class to
race and America, the photo reflects how fully Parks wedded his own social and
cultural interests to the FSA’s mission; in its fundamental, unmistakable
humanity, it reflects Parks’s lifelong talents as a portrait photographer.
2)
The Standard
Oil Company (New Jersey) Photography Project: After brief stints at the Office
of War Information (OWI) and freelancing for Vogue magazine, Parks once again went to work for Stryker, this
time for a series dedicated to capturing industrial settings and communities. Produced
for the oil company’s Public Relations department, this project was at least as
propagandistic in aim as anything done by the OWI. But as reflected in a
photograph like Workmen
in Powerhouse, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1944), in his work for the
project Parks couldn’t and didn’t elide either his social and cultural
interests or his talents for capturing complex human identities and lives. The
result is a snapshot of mid-century industrialism that complements the more
rural focus of the FSA work very potently.
3)
The Restraints: Open and Hidden:
Life magazine didn’t publish the Fort Scott series about which I wrote in
yesterday’s post, but they did employ Parks as a photojournalist for twenty
years; and while much of that work comprised portraits of
celebrities and other iconic
images, it also allowed Parks to continue investigating and portraying the
issues and themes of most interest to him. That was especially apparent in his
1956 photo essay The Restraints,
which followed three Mobile, Alabama African American families through their
daily lives within the Jim Crow South. Not as personal to Parks as the Fort
Scott series, perhaps, but just as historically and humanly revealing and
powerful, as was every stage of his impressive career.
Next Parks
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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