Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks (b. Fort Kansas, MI, 1912-2006) was one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century photography and a humanitarian deeply committed to social justice. As the first Black photographer for Life Magazine, he documented crucial aspects of American culture from the 1940s to 2006, focusing on race relations, poverty, civil rights, and urban life, often putting himself at risk to capture pivotal moments in history. In addition to his photography, Parks was a celebrated composer, author, and filmmaker, engaging with many leading figures of his era, from politicians and artists to athletes and celebrities.

Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, Parks was drawn to photography as a young man when he saw images of migrant workers taken by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers in a magazine. He worked several odd jobs until he bought a camera at a Pawn Shop in 1937 in Seattle and was hired to photograph fashion at a department store in Minneapolis. Receiving the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942, Parks joined the FSA and later the Office of War Information. He freelanced for Vogue and published two books on photography, Flash Photography (1947) and Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948). In 1948, Parks was hired by Life Magazine where he began to chronicle the nation’s societal conditions beginning with his first story, a piece on the gang wars that were consuming Harlem in the late 1940s. Parks found success when he met Red Jackson, a young Black man who led a gang known as the Midtowners and used his camera as a means to reﬂect his own complex ambitions in hoping to both bring Harlem’s brutality to light and present young men in quiet, contemplative moments and in the blurred heat of savage brawls.

Parks also gained access to the increasingly bellicose Black Muslim movement. When several white reporters were rebuffed in their requests for an audience with the group’s leaders, Parks—the only Black member of the magazine staff—was asked to try. During his investigations, he documented virtually every aspect of the Black Muslim community, in a full spectrum of images ranging from children and families at prayer to grown men exercising their physical strength in self-defense drills. Working for these agencies, Parks quickly developed a personal style that would make him among the most celebrated photographers of his era. His extraordinary pictures allowed him to break the color line in professional photography while he created remarkably expressive images that consistently explored the social and economic impact of poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination. A true Renaissance man, Gordon Parks passed away in 2006.

Parks’ photographs are in many public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; The Art Institute Chicago, Illinois; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum; and the International Center of Photography, New York. Recent exhibitions have been held at institutions including, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Carnegie Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Art Basel with Jenkins Johnson Gallery. Recent exhibitions include American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

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Jenkins Johnson Gallery will participate in Art Basel Miami Beach, December 8 - 10, 2023 Booth B31. We will feature artists that explore social and political issues of the African Diaspora by connecting past and current moments: Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Wadsworth Jarrell, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, Patrick Alston, Adrian Burrell, Dewey Crumper, Lisa Corinne Davis, Violet Fields, Alex Jackson, Blessing Ngobeni, Gregory Rick, Enrico Riley, and Raelis Vasquez. Jenkins Johnson Gallery will be participating in the Kabinett sector with a solo presentation of works on paper by Mary Lovelace O'Neal, featuring her iconic Lampblack (1970's) and Desert Women (1990's) series. In the Lampblack drawings she layers black charcoal and pastel, allowing slivers of negative space to invade the surface. These drawings speak to her affair with an "uncluttered minimalist viewpoint", invoking both a cultural and aesthetic sentiment. In Desert Women series, Lovelace O'Neal portrays garments worn in the Sahara Desert in Egypt and the Atacama Desert in Chile. She studied with master printmaker James Lesene Wells and at The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Lovelace O'Neal creates based on feeling and perception, forming moments of fleeting light. Her work is in museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore Museum, DeYoung Museum, and Brooklyn Museum. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in Spring 2024.