Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940 – 1950
Nico Wheadon, The Brooklyn Rail
November 2018
“We are with the new tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us. Voices are speaking. Men are moving. And we shall be with them!”
- Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, 1941
If Wright’s “new tide” embodies the wave of social change that engulfed a segregated 1940 America, Gordon Parks was an essential gravity that washed the revolution ashore. An icon of the Chicago Black Renaissance and postwar Harlem eras, Parks was a self-taught, genre-defying artist whose talent spanned photography, music, writing and film.