Sarah Lewis Instagram – “In the image many know of Rosa Parks, she is the silhouetted icon. She appears on the bus in Montgomery that helped launch the full force of the civil rights movement. The photograph was staged in late December 1956 just after the Supreme Court ruled that Montgomery’s segregated bus system was illegal… Parks’ only visible adornment is her hat, which to my young mind, when I first saw the picture, read as headgear—armor, a sign of battle.
Enter Coreen Simpson. In her lens, Parks is not in a silhouetted icon, but a woman in the act of being adorned by one. In it Parks wears Simpson’s own Black cameo as a brooch on the label of her dark jacket. It is an image that diagrams what is necessary to do the work to move masses: to delight in life and to relish beauty….”
Adapted from “Style as Political Statement” in Coreen Simpson (Aperture, 2024) | Posted on 02/Dec/2025 06:52:50
