Artist Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006)
Title Big Moma and Boy
Date 1961, printed 1972
Medium Gelatin silver print
Dimensions Overall: 13 x 19 1/4 in. (33 x 48.9 cm)
Credit Line Gift of G.W. Einstein Company. Inc. in honor of Thomas T. Solley, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 91.29
About this Work
Although Gordon Parks began his career working as a documentary photographer for the Farm Security Administration, his biggest impact came as a photojournalist. He was hired by Life magazine in 1948 as their first African American photographer. During his tenure with the magazine, he published many moving photo-essays—on an impoverished Brazilian boy named Flavio Da Silva, a young Harlem gang member named Leonard “Red” Jackson, and the Fontenelle family. For Parks the camera was more than simply a tool for recording society, it became a "weapon against poverty, racism, and discrimination."
Parks’s compelling photograph of Bessie Fontenelle and her youngest son Richard, Jr., was published by Life magazine on March 8, 1968, as part of a special feature on blacks and poverty called A Harlem Family (or At the Poverty Board). Parks’s essay and twenty-five photographs vividly depict the hardships of a Harlem family living under deplorable conditions. Taken shortly after Bessie violently retaliated against her husband’s abuse, this image, which appears on the opening spread, captures both her love for her son and her deep frustration and exhaustion—the dichotomy of a life torn between hope and despair. Her sadness is tempered by her child’s wide-eyed innocence. The article begins with this admonition: “What I want/What I am/What you force me to be/is what you are,” suggesting that we are all part of one global family. Sadly, only young Richard survived the family’s hardships and grew up to escape poverty.
