Artist Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006)
Title Flooded under pass near Springfield, Mass.: Springfield, Mass., Gilbert & Barker
Date February 1945
Medium Gelatin silver print
Dimensions Image: 7 9/16 × 7 1/2 in. (19.2 × 19.1 cm)
Credit Line Henry Holmes Smith Archive, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 79.200.XX.6.2
About this Work
Gordon Parks was a modern Renaissance man, recognized not only as a groundbreaking photojournalist, but also as a noted writer, filmmaker, and composer. In 1941, he was the first photographer to be named a Julius Rosenwald Foundation Fellow; in 1942 he became the first African American hired by Roy Stryker for the Farm Security Administration; and in 1943 he followed Stryker to the Office of War Information (OWI) and subsequently to the Standard Oil Photography Project in New Jersey. In 1952 twenty-eight vintage prints from the latter project were given by Stryker to Indiana University (Eskenazi Museum of Art 200.XX.6.1-.28). While Parks’s photo-documentary style during this period was influenced by other FSA photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, his status as a minority gave him a unique perspective, particularly on the lives of African Americans.
His biggest impact, though, came not in his early photo-documentary projects, but his work as a magazine photographer. Parks was hired by Life magazine in 1948 as their first African American photographer. During his tenure with the magazine, he published the story of the Fontenelle family and similarly moving photo-essays—on an impoverished Brazilian boy named Flavio Da Silva and a young Harlem gang member named Leonard “Red” Jackson. For Parks the camera was more than simply a tool for recording society, it became a "weapon against poverty, racism, and discrimination."
