Early Work Of Groundbreaking Photographer Gordon Parks On View At Addison Gallery Of American Art

Gordon Parks, 'Untitled, Harlem, New York,' 1947. Gelatin silver print. Image: 17.78 × 17.46 cm (7 × ... [+] 6 7/8 in.); sheet: 20.32 × 18.42 cm (8 × 7 1/4 in.); mat/frame: 17 x 14 in. On view at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts during the exhibition “Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950.”

This is a picture of institutional racism.

The confusion on this face is the result of institutional racism.

A black child, asked to pick between a white baby and a black baby, pointing at the white baby.

Does he choose the baby that looks like him, like the people he knows, validating his self-worth, or does he select the white child which a short life’s worth of external programming has already brainwashed him into believing is superior.

The outcome is clear. And heartbreaking.

The “doll test” was actually performed in the 1940’s. Psychiatric research on segregation and self-esteem put this question to African-American children in segregated schools. Children were shown a black doll and a white doll and asked to choose.

A majority picked the white doll.

The results indicated a lack of self-worth so patently ruinous to black communities that the study was cited by the Supreme Court when rendering its Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 which determined segregation of races in public schools was unconstitutional.

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) took the photo.

He attended a segregated school in Kansas.

This picture, and dozens of others equally as powerful in telling the story of working class and working poor black men, women, and especially children, across the United States, are on view now through April 26 at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts during the exhibition “Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950.”

Gordon Parks’ mother knew the damage segregation inflicted on black people. Her dying wish was for her son to leave the segregation of Fort Scott, Kansas for a better opportunity elsewhere, anywhere.

In 1928, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to Saint Paul, Minnesota to live with his older sister. Parks would never finish high school, but he would find photography and a career which would see him break barriers while traveling the world.

“Having personally experienced racism, poverty and discrimination, Parks understood and empathized with the people he photographed,” Allison Kemmerer, Mead Curator of Photography and Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at Addison Gallery of American Art, said. “I think it is this understanding and sympathy that invests his images with an emotional power that transcends mere documentation to get at something more universal.”

Gordon Parks, 'Tenement Dwellers, Chicago,' 1950 Gelatin silver print , image: 27.31 x 35.56 cm (10 ... [+] 3/4 x 14 in.) sheet: 27.31 x 35.56 cm (10 3/4 x 14 in.). On view at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts during the exhibition “Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950.”

During the 1940s, Parks blossomed from a self-taught photographer shooting portraits and documenting daily life in Saint Paul and Chicago to a visionary professional shooting for Ebony, Glamour, Smart Woman, and LIFE. He became the first African-American photographer at LIFE with his hiring in 1949.

“The fact that he could go from having never picked up a camera to becoming the first African-American staff photographer for LIFE magazine in just over 10 years certainly attests to his innate talent,” Kemmerer said. “Though he certainly benefited from interactions with the fellow photographers he met along the way, the development of his mature style and vision is truly the result of the experience gained from each phase of his early career—newspaper photojournalism, portrait photography, government work, corporate work with Standard Oil, and fashion/magazine work with a number of picture magazines.”

“Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950” highlights, for the first time, the formative first decade of Parks’ 60-year career bringing together 150 photographs and ephemera including magazines, books, letters and family pictures.

Gordon Parks, 'Gordon Parks Self-Portrait,' 1941. Gelatin silver print, sheet: 50.8 x 40.64 cm (20 x ... [+] 16 in.). On view at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts during the exhibition “Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950.”

Parks’ career as a photographer was launched in 1937 when he was bewitched by photographs of Dust Bowl migrants he saw in a magazine. After buying his first camera in a pawn shop and teaching himself how to use it, he soon began making portraits for Twin Cities African-American newspapers.

“I think Parks’ earliest photographs—the majority of which were portraits—reflect an unusual degree of perception for a beginner and an innate ability to not only communicate the essence of his subject, but also engage the viewer,” Kemmerer said. “It is that combination of giving his subject a voice and eliciting the viewer’s interest and compassion that would characterize all of Parks’s work to come.”

As his career began, in addition to portraits, he found himself photographing fashion for a Saint Paul clothing store. Parks would go on to shoot fashion photography in Paris.

From Fort Scott, Kansas, he would also travel to Italy, Portugal, Puerto Rico and widely throughout the United States and Canada.

After moving to Chicago in 1941, he came in contact with a vibrant local community of fellow black artists.

“His association with the South Side Community Art Center and subsequent immersion in Chicago’s Black Renaissance of painters, sculptors, writers, poets, educators and philosophers cannot be underestimated,” Kemmerer said. “The friendships forged with people like Charles White, Langston Hughes and Alain Locke not only offered artistic inspiration, but convinced him that art could indeed advance a social agenda.”

These artists encouraged Parks to take his camera into black communities to document the achievements of African-American culture and expose the injustices it faced.

Gordon Parks, 'Washington (southwest section), D.C. Two Negro boys shooting marbles in front of ... [+] their home,' November 1942. Gelatin silver print, image: 9.2 x 11.7 cm (3 5/8 x 4 5/8 in.), sheet: 10 x 12.4 cm (3 15/16 x 4 7/8 in.). The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by the Mundy Companies.

Parks’ will also feature prominently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this spring and summer. Debuting in May, “Gordon Parks and the Atmosphere of Crime” offers visitors a look at a selection of photographs he took in 1957 for a LIFE magazine series titled “The Atmosphere of Crime.” The series explores the intersection of crime and race. MoMA recently acquired 56 photos from the series including 55 color prints and one gelatin silver print.

Parks’ influence was not limited to photography. He directed 1971’s “Shaft” starring Richard Roundtree. An excerpt of the movie will be included in the MoMA exhibit.

But it is his early work which set the stage for the astonishing achievements to come.

“Parks’s photographs from the 1940s are the foundation of his career and as a result give us insight into his development as a photographer, how he defined his point of view as an African-American artist and documenter of American life, and how he ultimately used his camera as an incredibly powerful and persuasive ‘weapon against poverty, against racism, against all kinds of social wrongs,’” Kemmerer said, quoting the artist.