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Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks
10/30/1999 - 12/26/1999
Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks
is organized by the
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. This exhibition and
related programs are made possible by Ford Motor Company and Time
Warner Inc. Additional support has been provided by the Glen Eagles
Foundation, Cone-Laumont Editions, Ltd., Lamount Labs and Time Life
Photo Laboratories. The local presentation of this exhibition is
underwritten in part by the corporate sponsorship of NationsBank, a
grant from the Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin
Counties, Inc., and a grant from the Palmer Foundation.
THE FIRST complete retrospective exhibition of the works of renowned
American artist Gordon Parks opens at the Norton Museum of Art on
October 30, 1999. Parks is an American Renaissance man who has
mastered many media to express an uplifting and influential message
of hope in the face of adversity. This exhibition is organized by
the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and co-curated by Philip Brookman,
curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran, and Deborah
Willis, collections coordinator at the Center for African-American
History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution.
Although the 87 year-old Parks is best known as a photojournalist,
this retrospective brings together for the first time his
photographs with his works as a filmmaker, novelist, poet and
musician. Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks begins in the
present with several of his most recent images and then, like a
cinematic flashback, propels visitors into the past through Parks's
early photographs of Kansas that represent his childhood.
The exhibition features 219 photographs, with significant works from
each of Parks's major series from 1940 through 1997, combined with
his books, music, film and poetry. The result is, in the artist's
words, a "tone-poem" that impressionistically tells his own story.
Born in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1912, Gordon Parks was the youngest of
15 children. After his mother died when he was 16, Parks left Kansas
for Minneapolis and supported himself by working as a piano player,
busboy, basketball player and Civilian Conservation Corpsman. At the
age of 25, Parks began to seriously consider photography. While
working as a waiter on the Northern Pacific Railroad, he read
voraciously, wrote music and through reading the magazines of the
day, was introduced to pictures made by social documentary
photographers for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Farm Security
Administration (FSA) Historical Section. The photographers he
studied were Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange,
John Vachon, and Walker Evans. "They were photographing poverty, and
I knew poverty so well," Parks recalls.
Parks recalls finding a magazine left behind by a passenger on the
train which contained a portfolio of photographs of migrant workers
and the terrible conditions in which they lived. So moved was Parks
by those photographs that he went out and bought his first camera, a
Voightlander Brilliant, at a pawnshop for $7.50. He states that this
first purchase was "not much of a camera, but a great name to toss
around. I had bought what was to become my weapon against poverty
and racism."
In late 1941 Parks became the first photographer to receive a
fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation and chose to work
with Roy Stryker at the Farm Services Administration (FSA), a
government agency designed to call attention to the plight of the
needy during the Depression and to create an historical record of
social and cultural conditions across the country. He joined FSA in
January, 1942, moving his family to Washington, DC, where he
encountered a city divided by race and class. Over the next two
years, Parks received extensive training as a photojournalist under
Stryker's direction. "It's not enough to take one's picture and
label it bigot," Stryker told Parks. "You have to get at the source
of their bigotry. And that's not easy. The camera becomes a powerful
weapon when put to good use." One of the first photos Parks took
during that period is now considered his signature imageŃ American
Gothic.
"So it happened that, in one of the government's most sacred
strongholds, I set up my camera for my first professional
photograph," recalls Parks. "On the wall was a huge American Flag
hanging from the ceiling to the floor. I asked [the charwoman, Ella
Watson,] to stand before it, placed the mop in one hand; a broom in
the other, then instructed her to look into the lens." Half Past
Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks takes an extensive look at these
haunting images from the FSA.
In 1943 the FSA was dissolved for political reasons, but Roy Stryker
arranged for Parks to move with him to the Office of War Information
(OWI), where Parks was assigned as war correspondent to the 332nd
Fighter Group, the first black air corps. He photographed the
training program for the corps, but was refused permission to
accompany the 332nd fighter group to Europe, denying publicity to
African-American participation in the war. He then followed Stryker
to the Standard Oil (New Jersey) Photography Project, which allowed
some of the best photographers of the time to photograph in small
towns and industrial centers throughout the United States. Some of
Parks's most striking and influential work was made during this
time, including: Dinner Time at Mr. Hercules Brown's Home,
Somerville, Maine, 1944; Grease Plant Worker, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, 1946; Car Loaded with Furniture on Highway, 1945, and
Ferry Commuters, Staten Island, NY, 1946. Parks has lent vintage
prints of some of these rarely seen images to the exhibition,
sharing them publicly for the first time.
In 1944 Parks began to search for a job shooting fashion photos.
Despite racist attitudes of the day, Vogue editor Alexander Liberman
hired Parks to shoot a collection of evening gowns. Following that
first assignment, Parks photographed fashion for Vogue for the next
few years. During this time Parks published his first two books,
Flash Photography (1947) and Camera Portraits: Techniques and
Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948).
Parks found fashion photography interesting and rewarding, but also
wanted to use his talent as a photojournalist. In 1948 he approached
Life magazine and asked for a job photographing the gang wars in
Harlem as well as fashions in Paris. He was hired to do both.
"Suddenly for me," remembers Parks, "two extremely diverse worlds
were about to converge - one of crime, the other of high fashion."
In what was to become his trademark style, Parks chose to focus his
story on Harlem gangs - concentrating on an individual and the small
group around him. 16-year-old Red Jackson was leader of the
Midtowners, one of the toughest gangs in New York City. Parks was
able to engage his trust, and his photographs show the complexity of
their relationship. In one very famous photograph, Red Jackson,
Harlem Gang Leader, (with Cigarette), 1948, Jackson is caught in a
moment of reflection as he looks out a broken tenement window. In
another, Red Jackson and Herbie Levy study wounds on face of slain
gang member Maurice Gaines, 1948, Jackson and a fellow gang member
stare at the body of a friend in his coffin, victim of a gang
"rumble." Through these extra-ordinary images, Parks displays not
just the violence of the gangs, but the complex humanity of its
players, and victims. He is able to go beyond the stereotypical
images that most Americans of the time had about Harlem and its
underbelly to reveal something poignant and universal about its
people.
In 1950 he moved to Paris as a European correspondent, photographing
in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal for several years. Parks was
given great access to the stars, gained their trust and was able to
shoot beautiful and touching portraits of them. The exhibition
includes his portraits of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossolini
during their famous tryst on the island of Stromboli, as well as
portraits of Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp,
Gloria Vanderbilt, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and others.
One series of photographs included in the exhibition that perhaps
best illustrates his ability to move between such different realms
for the sake of his work was shot in Estoril, Portugal, in 1950. He
depicted deposed monarchs and wealthy diners, juxtaposed with images
of poor children begging for food. Here, the meaning of his
photographs stems from the visual dialogue between rich and poor,
rather than from one or the other.
In 1956 Parks ventured into the deep South where he photographed an
eloquent story about segregation in the United States. Working in a
small town near Birmingham, Alabama, in the same year as the
Montgomery bus boycott, he documented the effects of segregation on
one family. These images, such as Willy Causey and Family, Shady
Grove, Alabama, focus on all aspects of everyday life for three
generations of the Causey family. Following publication of these
pictures in Life, the Causey family was forced to leave home as the
civil rights movement was just gaining momentum. The following year
Parks followed the police in Chicago for a major story about crime.
One of the most poignant and successful projects Parks completed for
Life was about Flavio Da Silva, a young boy he met in the slums of
Brazil. In 1961 he was assigned to photograph poverty against the
backdrop of cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro. Like his essays about
Harlem Gangs and segregation, he focused on the impact of his theme
on individuals. He photographed Flavio, his parents, brothers and
sisters, living together in a one-room shack in the midst of extreme
poverty. Parks photographed and wrote about the family's reliance on
their son and his deteriorating health, detailing a story which has
become a classic example of photojournalism. When this story was
published, readers contributed money to help with Flavio's medical
care. Eventually, he was brought to the United States for treatment,
and other money contributed was used to buy a new home for his
family and help educate him and his siblings.
By the 1960s Parks was one of the most influential photojournalists
of his time. Along with many other projects he continued his work
about civil rights in the United States. In 1963 he also published
the autobiographical novel The Learning Tree. Life commissioned
Parks to create a series of photographs that evoked personal
memories of his childhood, based on this book. These images were
published in the magazine with his memoir, How It Feels to Be
Black, an emotional essay that brought together his personal and
social concerns. The same year he documented the Black Muslims,
including Malcolm X, in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, detailing
the development of education and self-reliance in this emerging
religious and social movement. When Life printed Parks's passionate
close-up of a crying girl's face on the cover of a 1967 issue about
poverty in the U.S., he again connected readers to the real-life
emotions of one family. For this assignment he photographed the
Fontennelle family at home in a Harlem welfare office, evoking their
personal struggles and the children's perseverance.
Parks began to manipulate color photographs in 1958. The following
year Life published a series that were made to accompany poems that
he selected. These works evoke the rhythmic visual imagery found in
the poetry. His experiments include multiple exposures, collage and
painting on pictures. He has continued this process through the
present, and has evolved a lyrical style that fluctuates between
realism and abstraction. This exhibit highlights early work from the
late 1940s to the mid-1960s, including his famous Leopard, Brazil,
1962, and Chimney Tops, Paris, 1964 and fashions, landscapes and
nudes from the mid-1960s through the 1980s. Parks's most recent
works, made in the 1990s are abstract landscapes, photographed in
the studio using combinations of shells, flowers, paintings and
complex lighting. These are printed with the aid of computer imaging
as Iris-jet prints. More than twenty of these new works are
included.
In addition to The Learning Tree, Parks has written three other
books about his life: A Choice of Weapons; To Smile in Autumn; and
Voices in the Mirror. In addition, Parks published several volumes
of poetry combined with his photographs, including Gordon Parks: A
Poet and His Camera; Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things;
Gordon Parks: In Love, Moments Without Proper Names; Arias of
Silence; and Glimpses Toward Infinity. His films include
Flavio,
Diary of a Harlem Family; The Learning Tree; Shaft; Shaft's Big
Score; Super Cops; Leadbelly; Solomon Northrup's Odyssey; and
Martin. Parks's musical compositions of classical, blues, and
popular music - including a symphony, sonatas, concertos, and a
ballet - have been performed internationally.
The Norton Museum of Art is pleased to be a part of the
much-anticipated exhibition Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon
Parks. Parks's art expresses the lessons of his early life and
imparts these to future generations. This exhibition unlocks the
door to this uncommon and uncompromising vision.
Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks. Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. (202) 639-1703
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