Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was a singular figure in the 20th century, transcending every boundary erected against Black America to become one of the greatest artists of our times. The self-taught photographer, who barely escaped lynching as a child and ended up homeless as a young teen, used the injustice levelled against him as fuel to chart his own path through the mainstream in order to tell stories of Black America from the inside.
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As the first Black photographer working for LIFE magazine, Parks’ photographs of segregation in the South, pictures made in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, scenes of crime in major cities in the 1950s, and documentation of the Civil Rights Movement have become some of the most indelible images of mid-century America.
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The new exhibition, Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole, offers an intimate portrait of the complex realities for Black Americans between 1942 and the 1970s. The exhibition opens with an essay by New Yorker journalist Jelani Cobb, drawing parallels between the lives of George Floyd and Gordon Parks, both of whom moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in search of a better life.
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