‘The camera is my weapon of choice’: Gordon Parks’ era-defining shots of segregation – and those who defied it
Oliver Laughland, The Guardian
March 2026
In the summer of 1956, the American news magazine Life dispatched its first Black staff photographer, Gordon Parks, to Alabama, with a brief to document racial segregation in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott. The trip was a perilous one, but Parks, then in his early 40s, was already on a career trajectory that would mark him out as one of the most consequential artists of his generation. The images he returned with were remarkable: intimate and vivid depictions of the daily disgrace of the Jim Crow south. They still feel prescient today. […]