Show offers introduction to work of documentary photographer Gordon Parks
Published Monday October 13th, 2008
WILMINGTON, Del. - From the streets of Harlem to the pitiful slums of Brazil, Gordon Parks focused his lens - and his life - on subjects that many people would prefer to ignore.
But the images that Parks captured as one of the most accomplished documentary photographers of the 20th century - and the first black staff photographer for Life magazine - are too powerful to shy away from.
From the forgotten lives defined by violence and poverty to the unguarded moments of the rich and famous, he captured the human condition in a way that few others artists have.
Bare Witness, an exhibit opening this weekend at the Delaware Art Museum, offers visitors a comprehensive and thought-provoking introduction to Parks's work. The museum is one of only five stops for the show, which debuted last year at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and will be on display in Wilmington through Jan. 4 before a final stop at Northwestern University's Block Museum of Art.
Born in Kansas, son of a farmer and the youngest of 15 children, Parks moved to Minnesota as a teenager to live with a sister after his mother died, dropping out of high school just short of graduation and struggling through a series of Depression-era jobs.
He eventually landed work as a Pullman dining car waiter, a job in which he became fascinated with New Deal images of poverty captured by Farm Security Administration photographers in magazines left behind by train passengers.
His interaction with passengers, including Life photographer Bernard Hoffman and war photographer Robert Capa, only deepened his love of photography, and he eventually began his career as a freelance fashion photographer. Parks moved his family to Chicago in 1940, and a photography exhibit the following year earned him a fellowship that allowed him to spend a year in Washington as an FSA photographer, a period in which he captured perhaps his most famous image, American Gothic (1942).
An interpretation of the iconic 1930 painting by Grant Wood, Parks' photograph shows a black cleaning woman, Ella Watson, standing in front of an American flag while holding a mop and broom, echoing the stoic stance of the pitchfork-wielding farmer in Woods' painting. American Gothic is one of 73 images that Parks, who died in 2006, helped select for the Bare Witness retrospective after being approached by the Capital Group Foundation, working in collaboration with the Cantor Arts Center.
Heather Campbell Coyle, associate curator at the Delaware Art Museum and a University of Delaware doctoral student in art history, was teaching a class in the history of photography when she learned of the Parks retrospective. She jumped at the chance to bring it to Wilmington.
"He's one of my favourite artists to teach," said Coyle, who used the opportunity afforded by the Parks exhibit to showcase 28 equally compelling documentary photographs from the DAM's permanent collection.
The Parks exhibit spans four decades of his work, including his first photo essay for Life, a 1948 examination of Harlem gangster Red Jackson.
The danger that Parks faced is illustrated in the darkened shadows of Night Rumble, in which a gang member, his back to the camera and arm raised, prepares to strike out at an unseen foe while two bystanders clutch each other in a fearful embrace.
"Just another one of the thousands of violences that explode in the ghetto every week," Parks wrote 20 years later in describing an emergency room visit prompted by a fight between a man and woman whose Harlem family he documented in a 1968 photo essay entitled The Negro and the Cities: The Cry That Will Be Heard.
The dominant theme of the exhibit is not violence, however, but poverty, whether it be urban images reminiscent of the 19th-century New York City street scenes captured by Jacob Riis, or images from the rural South in the 1950s.
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