GORDON PARKS
Josh Lustig, FT Weekend Magazine
March 2026
Gordon Parks was 25 when he first got his hands on a camera. He picked it up in a pawn shop for less than $12. “It was my choice of weapon against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty,” Parks said in 1967. “I could have just as easily picked up a knife or gun, like many of my childhood friends did.”
One of the greatest artists of his generation, Parks was the first Black staff photographer at Life Magazine. Born in 1912, during an unparalleled period of racial violence and rampant criminality - the era of racial terror lynching - Parks’ work unflinchingly holds up a mirror to the hypocrisies of mid-century America: a country where the South was still ruled over by Jim Crow laws, while proclaiming to be the “land of the free”. The current exhibition at Alison Jacques gallery has been curated by attorney Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.