Gordon Parks had a way of seeing past his subjects’ surface atmosphere, down to the molten core. As the first Black photographer at Life magazine, and the first Black director of a Hollywood feature film, he unveiled inner worlds that others misperceived or overlooked.
A new exhibition, “Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror,” timed to the 20th anniversary of the artist’s death, examines the source and scope of Parks’s insight. On view at Jack Shainman Gallery in Lower Manhattan from Sept. 18 to Nov. 6, it pairs some of his most famous portraits — of Malcolm X, Ingrid Bergman, Muhammad Ali, Gloria Vanderbilt and many more — with new reflections by the subjects’ survivors or descendants. They testify to the unusually intimate bond that Parks formed with many who stood before his camera.
“Gordon had an ability to capture people in vulnerable and reflective moments,” Lonnie Ali, who wrote one of the reflections in the exhibit and was married to Muhammad from 1986 until his death in 2016, said in an interview. “He got another side of Muhammad — the quiet, pensive, private side — not the flashy, braggadocios young athlete who he was publicly.”
Born to farmers in rural Kansas in 1912, Parks rose to prominence at Life in the 1950s and ’60s. He became known for striking and humane portrait series of ordinary Black citizens navigating life under segregation, and later for embedding with leaders of the Black liberation movement, including Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael and Ali.
