Artist Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006)
Title Harvey Turner, grease maker, weighing lime. When added to the grease, lime gives it body. Pittsburgh Grease Plant.
Date September 1946
Medium Gelatin silver print
Dimensions Image: 7 5/8 × 7 7/16 in. (19.4 × 18.9 cm)
Sheet: 7 5/8 × 7 7/16 in. (19.4 × 18.9 cm)
Credit Line Henry Holmes Smith Archive, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 79.200.XX.6.21
About this Work
The African American photographer, writer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks was able to break the boundaries of racism, while at the same time commenting on its place in American society. The youngest of fifteen children from a poor Kansas family, he took up photography at the age of fifteen and won the first Julius Rosenwald Fellowship Award for photography seven years later. This success led to his hiring by Roy E. Stryker for the Farm Security Administration’s depression-era photography project. As the only black photographer on staff, Parks brought a unique perspective on the lives of African-Americans. This photograph is from Parks’s 1946 series taken at the Pittsburgh Grease Company. Many photos from this series featured the company’s black employees; here, a worker weighing out white powder (lime) is presented with an air of great dignity and determination.
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."
