The Best Photos of 2024: The State of America
Orla Brennan, AnOther
December 2024
Few photographers have captured the experience of being Black in a hostile, changing mid-century America as famously – or indeed, with such tender clarity – as Gordon Parks. This year, alongside an exhibition at Jack Shainman in New York, a new book revisits Park’s seminal photographs and essays recorded between the years of 1963 and 1970 for Life magazine. ‘On a scholarly and theoretical level, the book has provided space to consider the various meanings and debates about what it means to be Black, and Blackness as a political, philosophical, and aesthetic category,’ writes scholar Nicole R Fleetwood in the book, which uniquely reveals, alongside photography, how Parks’ writing was ‘the most personal and intimate form of expression throughout his life’. […]