‘The camera is my weapon of choice’: the apartheid footage that defined the era of Gordon Parks – and those who challenged it | Photography

IIn the summer of 1956, the American news magazine Life She sent the first black photographer of her staff, Gordon Parks, to Alabama, with a brief documenting segregation in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott. The journey was fraught with danger, but Parks, then in his early 40s, was already on a career path that would mark him as one of the most important artists of his generation. The images he returned with were remarkable: an intimate, vivid depiction of the daily shame of the Jim Crow South. They still feel prescient today.

The images form the backbone of a new survey of Parks’ work, which opens this week at Alison Jacques Gallery in London and is curated by Bryan Stevenson, the famous civil rights lawyer. Stevenson is based in Montgomery where he founded a museum and memorial commemorating black victims of lynching and where some of Parks’ works are on permanent display. He chose images taken between 1942 and 1967, the artist’s most active period as a photographer and an acute period of upheaval in the American experience.

For Stevenson, the new show particularly resonates as Donald Trump’s second presidency intensifies a renewal of historical revisionism informed by the forces of white nationalism and censorship. “We live in a time of tremendous retreat from the civil rights era,” Stevenson tells me. “At a time when content is being removed from cultural institutions across the United States, when there is resistance, even contempt, to anyone who tries to talk openly about this history, this exhibition is timely and urgent. Because it speaks to the way Parks confronted these same conditions at a time when there was no precedent for this kind of art as a weapon for change.”

The photographs from Parks’ mission in Alabama partly follow one extended family, the Thorntons, in the isolated coastal city of Mobile. Filmed in colour, it captures the dignity of a family in the face of everyday brutality – at the water fountains, shops and restaurants all governed by a “separate but equal” creed. At a time when most Americans were exposed to black-and-white news photography, the stunningly bright contrasts and soft pastels elevated the narrative to another level.

“Most people saw this community fighting segregation in only this two-dimensional way,” Stevenson says. “And I think Parks understood that it was much more dynamic and artistic and much more interesting than those photographs can sometimes capture. The use of color really brought the damage to life in ways that had never been missed before.”

One photo, titled “Looking From the Outside,” depicts a group of black children peering through a chain-link fence onto a manicured, whites-only playground in the distance. “This resonated deeply with me because I grew up in a community where there was segregation,” Stevenson says, recalling a childhood trip to South Carolina when he and his sister were racially abused for entering a hotel swimming pool frequented by white children. “When I see these kids staring, it brings back my own experience. It has so much power because it brings up the hidden damage of exclusion that I don’t think we always talk about.”

The new show extends far beyond Alabama, drawing works from Parks’ stints documenting poverty in New York’s Harlem, his time photographing Malcolm Martin Luther King Jr. — who delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the event — was photographed from a distance standing on the podium, surrounded by the outline of a wavy flag. In another shot, a spectator sits above the crowd and shouts through the crowd.

“Because Parks had experience challenging bigotry along the way, he really looked for the human narrative,” Stevenson says. “People weren’t just participants, they weren’t just ‘protesters’ or ‘marchers’ — he wanted to show people as mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, pastors and people trying to live their lives. I think he saw in Dr. King, yes, a great leader, but he also saw a human being who just wanted his children to be able to live in a world where they weren’t assumed to be dangerous or guilty because of their race, where they wouldn’t be burdened in the same way that he had been.”

Parks was born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, in an era of segregation and lynching. The youngest of 15 children, he attended a segregated primary school, and recalled that when he was 11, he was attacked by three white boys who threw him into a river thinking he could not swim. At the age of fourteen, after the death of his parents, he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota (nearby Minneapolis) to live with his sister. He did not turn to photography until his late twenties, after holding a range of jobs, from brothel pianist to traveling railway waiter. His break came in 1942 when he was hired as a documentary photographer by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C.

It was here that Parks took perhaps his most famous photograph, a portrait of Ella Watson, a part-time cleaner, whom he photographed for several months in the nation’s capital while she was raising her grandchildren alone in poverty. Watson’s father was killed by a mob, and her husband was shot dead two days before their second daughter was born. The image, titled American Gothic, shows Watson standing in the halls of power, staring out while holding a broom and mop in front of an American flag.

It was considered too difficult to publish at the time. Stevenson naturally included it in his organization, describing it as a manifestation of themes found in much of Parks’ canon. It is, he says, “a story of trial and tribulation, but also of triumph and dignity.”

Parks later became the first black director to helm a major Hollywood production, a dramatization of his semi-autobiographical novel The Learning Tree., It was released in 1969. Two years later, he directed the crime thriller Shaft, which helped move the blaxploitation genre into the mainstream. In 2007, a year after his death, a school in St. Paul was renamed in his honor. The building is located just a few miles from the neighborhood where Rene Judd and Alex Peretti were shot to death by immigration agents earlier this year, and where George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in 2020.

I asked Stevenson, if he were alive today, how Parks might have wanted to document this moment of violence and oppression in the city where he came of age. “I think he wanted to remind people that this is not uncommon, this is not new,” he says. “He was in urban areas after Dr. King was assassinated. He saw the anger and frustration. He was among people asking all the time: ‘How can we change things?’ How do we confront a government that is so hostile to us?” And he spent time with members of the Nation of Islam, the Panthers, who were targets of the FBI and the Department of Justice, and sometimes fatal victims of that targeting. He had a very keen eye for that. He understood that.”

Parks described his camera as his “weapon of choice” against the social injustices he faced. It’s a saying that applies to Minneapolis today; The killings of Judd, Pretty, and Floyd were caught on camera by citizen observers, helping to advance the issues of extreme immigration enforcement and racially biased policing around the world. But the power of this weapon is being tested like never before. With AI image-processing capabilities becoming ubiquitous, and even being used by the White House to post digitally altered propaganda images of protesters, does Stevenson think Parks’s worldview might be under threat?

“I think technology and social media create new challenges for telling the truth,” he says. “But I still believe that a camera can be a powerful weapon – in the hands of a gifted storyteller, which is what I saw in Gordon Parks. He was an artist whose skill went beyond taking an image. It was his vision – creating a story around an image – that allowed viewers to experience something they might not have experienced before. It will feel real in ways that AI techniques can’t achieve. That’s the power of storytelling with art.”