Iconic photography capturing 20th-century American life by a barrier-breaking African American artist will be on view at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art this spring. The exhibition “Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks,” in the Block’s Main Gallery April 24 to June 28, 2009, features 73 works personally selected by Parks, the first African American hired by a mass-circulation magazine (“Life”) and the first to direct movies (“Shaft,” “The Learning Tree”) in the Hollywood studio system.
Many of Parks’ images, such as custodian Ella Watson posing with her mop and broom before a U.S. flag in “American Gothic” (1942), 1952’s “Emerging Man” coming up from under a Harlem street, Malcolm X addressing a 1963 Black Muslim rally in Chicago, the fists of boxer Muhammad Ali following a 1966 victory, and exiled Black Panthers Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver in Algeria in 1970, helped define the social changes, monumental events, and key figures that drove the United States during the second half of the last century.
Parks (1912–2006) grew up poor in Kansas and Minnesota during the Great Depression, dropping out of high school just a few months before graduation. In the 1930s while working as waiter on a Pullman train car he became fascinated by photographs in magazines left behind by passengers. Within a few years Parks had purchased his first camera; later explaining his attraction to the medium, he said, “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs.”
After working as a fashion photographer for a St. Paul clothing store, in 1940 Parks moved to Chicago and the city’s Bronzeville area, home to a flourishing African American literary and artistic circle similar to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. (“Bare Witness” includes a 1941 portrait Parks took in Chicago of Langston Hughes, the author and poet essential to the black cultural movements in both New York and the Chicago.) After an exhibition of his photographs at the South Side Community Art Center led to a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, Parks moved to Washington, D. C. to work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the New Deal-era federal agency charged with documenting and combating poverty in America. Parks’ first assignment produced a classic series of photographs detailing the day-to-day life of FSA building janitor Ella Watson and her family, including “American Gothic.” Over the following years Parks would produce a remarkable set of documentary images for the Office of War Information and the Standard Oil of New Jersey photography project.
In 1948 Parks’ first cover photograph for “Life” hit newsstands and American homes; later that year his photographic essay on a Harlem gang leader led to a full time job at the magazine. During the next two decades Parks contributed several photo-essays—photographs accompanied by his text—on subjects ranging from poverty in urban and rural America and Brazil to African American leaders such as Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party and cultural figures such as actress Ingrid Bergman, composer Leonard Bernstein, and boxer Muhammad Ali. His 1961 essay on an asthmatic boy in the slums of Rio de Janiero spurred $30,000 in donations from “Life” magazine readers; the money allowed the child to travel to the United States for treatment and his family to build a new home.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Parks turned toward cinema, writing, and music, directing several motion pictures (including the hits “Shaft” and “Shaft’s Big Score”), publishing a number of memoirs and books of poetry, and composing film scores, a symphony, and the libretto and music for a ballet about Martin Luther King. Before his death in 2006, Parks chose the photographs on display in “Bare Witness” as representative of his best work for the collection of The Capital Group Foundation.
The Block Museum is located on the southern end of Northwestern University’s Evanston campus, at 40 Arts Circle Drive, 60208. Admission to the exhibition is free. The museum is open Tuesdays 10 am to 5 pm; Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays 10 am to 8 pm; and Saturdays and Sundays noon to 5 p.m. Parking passes are required at all other times and can be purchased for $7 at the Block Museum or at the University Parking Office at 1819 Hinman Avenue. Permits should be obtained before parking your vehicle. For more information and directions, phone 847.491.4000 or visit the Block Museum website at : www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
