Last month we kicked off More Than a Month, SFPL's celebration of Black culture and heritage, with a talk by JPC archivist Jehoiada Calvin about the work of Moneta Sleet, Jr., staff photographer at Ebony magazine for more than four decades. Today we are looking at the work of Gordon Parks, the first Black staff photographer for Life magazine, a publication that featured his photographs for many decades. Additionally, his photographs of many sorts appeared in the pages of Vogue, Ebony, Fortune, and Glamour magazines.
Parks was a true renaissance man, not being limited to photography, although his magazine work is the focus of this blog post. He created landmark films that repositioned the agency of Black characters, transforming them into protagonists in their own right; he composed classical music pieces; he wrote novels; he exercised avidly. In short he was a well rounded man of arts and letters.
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| Gordon Parks, as seen in the monograph The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 |
Gordon Parks
In a profile in a 1997 issue of Life, Jimmie Briggs describes an 84-year-old Parks lighting his pipe in frustration after a jogging accident slowed him down with two torn Achilles tendons. Up until then he went on regular jogs most days of the week; having been laid up by the injury, he used his extra time to work on his next novel and compose a piano sonata dedicated to his children.
In the piece, Parks says of his famous photo American Gothic (1942), which features Ella Watson holding a broom upside down in front of an American flag with a mop propped in the background, "I didn't think it would be published. It was an indictment of the government" (p. 94).
For more biographical information about Parks, visit the website of the Parks Foundation.
1957 Assignment to NYC, Chicago, SF, and LA
At the Baltimore Art Museum, Parks's photographs from a 1957 Life magazine photo essay titled "The Atmosphere of Crime" are part of a new exhibit of works from the permanent collection. A gift from Gail and Tony Ganz, the 2019 pigment-based inkjet prints showcase Parks's photographs divorced from the text with which they originally appeared, freeing the photographs to arrest the attention of museum-goers without the heavy rhetoric of the article.
One of our librarians was fortunate to recently view the exhibit and learn of Parks's work and was eager to use SFPL's Life Magazine Archive to check it out. (Did you know SFPL provides access to every Life magazine article from Nov 23, 1936 through May 1, 2000 in this online archive?)
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| Photographic prints created in 2019 from Parks's negatives of his 1957 assignment for Life magazine on exhibit at the Baltimore Art Museum |
For the original piece, Parks, by this time having worked as a staff photographer for Life for a decade, and reporter Henry Suydan traveled from New York City to Chicago to San Francisco and Los Angeles, shadowing police on their daily assignments. Parks later said, "My assignment: explore crime across America. A journey through hell... The year was 1957. I rode with detectives through shadowy districts, climbed fire escapes, broke through windows and doors with them. Brutality was rampant. Violent death showed up from dawn to dawn" (The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, page 5).
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| Cover of the Sept 9, 1957 issue of Life |
Apparently, Parks and Suydan briefed Life journalist Robert Wallace on their field reporting. Wallace has the byline for the article, so he must have been the one to dig deep into the pearl-clutching tendencies of Life magazine readers without synthesizing the realities found by Gordon and Suydan on the trip. The separation of the work of the field reporters and the work of the author of the published words can explain the disconnect between the cinematic nuance of Parks's photographs and the article's content. Where Parks's photographs allude to the seen as much as the unseen, gesturing at the humanity of all subjects of his photographs, the article does little to contemplate the racial motivation at the center of of the law enforcement in the USA during this time period.
The photo essay was published in the September 9, 1957 issue of Life magazine, without so much as a credit to Parks or Suydan.
See for Yourself
Click "Access now (PDF)" in the Life magazine archive to view the photo essay, "The Atmosphere of Crime" digitally.
Additionally, a book of the work with accompanying essays was published in 2021 and SFPL owns two copies of this book.
To see more work like this from Parks's early Life oeuvre, check out the following two Life photo essays:
Harlem Gang Leader, November 1, 1948, Life magazine. Click "Access now (PDF)" in the Life magazine archive to view a PDF of the photo essay.
Parks Interview in the History Makers
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| Click the image above to access Parks's History Makers interview |
