The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has recently opened an exhibition celebrating the art of Gordon Parks (1912-2006), one of the most distinguished photographers of the 20th century. In the heyday of large-format magazines, Parks created photo essays that regularly appeared in LIFE, EBONY, VOGUE, and GLAMOUR. In 1949, LIFE hired him as the first African American on its staff, a position he held until 1972.

Left: Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1941, gelatin silver print, Purchased as the Gift of Alan and Marsha Paller, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Marc Andreessen via the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Raj and Indra Nooyi, Mitchell P. Rales, David M. Rubenstein, and Darren Walker in honor of Sharon Percy Rockefeller , 2021.61.1

The National Gallery’s exhibition “Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits” was inspired by Parks’ 1948 book, CAMERA PORTRAITS; THE TECHNIQUES AND PRINCIPLES OF DOCUMENTARY PORTRAITURE. Here, he urged photographers to move portrait photography out of the controlled environment of a studioand instead to use a documentary approach that situated subjects where they lived and worked. For himself, Parks strongly believed that documentary photographers had a “moral obligation” to absorb their subjects’ lives-and-times in order to convey a semblance of “truthful” imagery. (NGA Press Release)

CAMERA PORTRAITS focuses on Parks’ portraiture after World War II, and highlights the new kind of documentary photography he advocated. Sarah Greenough, exhibition curator and head of the NGA photography department, explains that Parks’ priority was “to capture the character of the people he photographs, whether famous or not,” and to use imagery to place an individual’s cultural significance in their own times. (NGA Press Release)

The exhibition of twenty-five portrait photographs is drawn from art of the Corcoran Collection now owned by the National Gallery. The Corcoran was founded in 1869 as the first public art museum in Washington, D.C., with a mission to be “used soley for the purpose of encouraging American genius.” It became a major center of historic and contemporary American art, but finincial struggles forced it to close in 2014. The NGA became the repository of 8,631 pieces from the Corcoran, and regularly displays such prominent pieces from that collection as the photographs of Gordon Parks.

Right: Gordon Parks, Muhammad Ali, 1966, printed later, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection), 2016.117.257

Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks grew up impovershed in deeply segregated times. In the 1930s, he was working as a waiter on the North Coast Limited passenger train when he saw magazines with such striking Depression images as Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant agricultural worker’s family, Nipomo, California.” These photographs struck a chord because the travails of Dust Bowl migrants reminded Parks of his own struggles. Inspired, he bought his first camera in 1937 and was intent on using photography to portray how Black Americans remained enmeshed in the coils of segregation.

Parks came to Washington, D.C., in 1942 with a fellowship to work as a photographer at the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Roy Stryker, who headed the FSA’s Historical Division, had famously hired Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to document the impact of the Great Depression on American farmers. He encouraged Parks to find a way to convey what he experienced, and “to express it in pictures.” (Quoted in NGA, “Gordon Parks: Words and Images” information sheet) He told Parks to first explore segregated Washington without his camera so he could experience first-hand how it felt not to be served at a lunch counter or blocked from attending a film. Only then, Stryker instructed, would Parks’ camera have a moral story to tell.

But not all stories were rooted in negativity. In a 1964 interview, Parks explained that Stryker also made him interested in “getting to know all kinds of people better, and (to) investigate their ills and prejudices, their good and their evil.” (Oral history interview, December 30, 1964, Archives of American Art)

Left: Gordon Parks, Trapped in abandoned building by a rival gang on street, Red Jackson ponders his next move, 1948, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection), 2015.19.4605

In postwar years, Parks became friends with writer/activist Ralph Ellison, and they collaborated on projects that documented the daily injustices faced by Black Americans. They walked the streets of Harlem together, and Ellison included some of their impressions in his 1952 novel, INVISIBLE MAN. One of the photographs Parks made during these walks was “Soapbox Orator, Harlem, NY, 1952,” which is included in the NGA exhibition. Parks soon became involved in the Civil Rights movement, and photographed such prominent activist figures as Malcolm X and John Lewis, whose portraits are included in the exhibition.

To establish the significant range of Parks photography, the CAMERA PORTRAITS exhibition also displays the photographs he made for popular large-format magazines, notably of such midcentury arts figures as Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Alberto Giacometti, and Alexander Calder.

It is a wonderful exhibition, but there are serious problems in presentation. Gordon Parks’ magnificant portrait photographs are displayed by stacking them on the wall! Apparently, this was the only solution to having them shoehorned in an exhibition space confined to two small rooms.

Right: Gordon Parks, Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan (Bert Collins and Pauline Terry), 1950, printed later, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection), 2016.117.150

Why have these images not been given the expansive exhibition space they so well deserve? The unfortunate possibility is a belabored attempt at “inclusiveness.” Concerned that it needed to exhibit the work of a prominent Black artist, did the National Gallery quickly assemble this show to check-off that box?

Gordon Parks deserves better.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor

GORDON PARKS: CAMERA PORTRAITS will be up at the National Gallery through January 12, 2025.