Ella Watson: The Empowered Woman of Gordon Parks’s ‘American Gothic’
Deborah Willis, The New York Times
May 2018
‘The first time I saw Gordon Parks’s photograph “American Gothic” — during a slide presentation in an undergraduate art school class in the 1970s — I was awe-struck.
I wanted to hold fast to the memory of that image of Ella Watson even as the professor moved to the next photo. Her polka-dot dress with puffed sleeves and two missing buttons, her wire-rimmed glasses half in shadow. The inverted tools of her trade, the straw curve of the worn broom and the curl of cotton mop, made me curious.’ […]