Adrienne Cheatham Instagram – On this last day of Black History Month I will close out my at-home celebration with a piece by a true icon, Gordon Parks. From the @gordonparksfoundation
This piece is from his “Segregation in the South” series for Life Magazine in 1956. “Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping.” My husband I saw this after our wedding and decided that this would be our wedding gift to eachother. When it arrived we poured a glass of wine and sat and looked at it for a couple hours. I’m struck by several things, including the thought of what this little girl is being groomed to accept. Whiteness as the beauty standard and this venerated, revered ideal that she cannot even deign to touch, lest she and her family endure the wrath that would follow. After an hour of quietly studying this photograph we noticed that just above the grandmother’s head you can see Gordon Parks’ reflection in the glass. The barrel of the camera over his eye, wearing a plaid shirt and his distinctive mane. He is documenting but he is also living this experience. Even as a registered journalist for the largest publication in the country, he faced the same threats the family he documented endured as a Black person bringing attention to the ways of the south.
A little more about Gordon Parks:
From the 1940s, Gordon Parks documented American life and culture. Born into poverty in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was drawn to photography as a young man. Despite his lack of professional training, he won a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for his photography in 1942; this led to a position with the photography section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C., and, later, the Office of War Information (OWI), documenting American life. By the mid-1940s, he worked as a freelance fashion photographer for publications such as Vogue, Glamour, and Ebony. Parks was hired in 1948 as a staff photographer for Life magazine where he created some of his most notable work. In 1969 he became the first African American to write and direct a major Hollywood studio feature film, The Learning Tree, followed by Shaft. Parks continued photography, making films, publishing, and composing until his death in 2006. | Posted on 29/Feb/2024 20:54:23
