‘He’s inspired so many of us’: how Gordon Parks changed photography
Janelle Zara, The Guardian
November 2021
By and large, the segregation of 20th-century America was documented in black and white, storing our collective memory in stoic, colorless images of violence and exclusion. The late Gordon Parks, however, a titan of 20th-century photography, had taken a decidedly different approach. In 1956, as the first Black staff photographer of Life magazine, he traveled in and around Mobile, Alabama, on assignment to capture the realities of Jim Crow. He chose to shoot in color, aiming his lens at both the more vibrant and quotidian moments of Black American daily life: the church picnic, the trip to the ice cream shop, the hanging of laundry out to dry. […]