Gordon Parks - America Is Me

Gordon Parks: The Consciousness of Being Black in the Americas

Gordon Parks is one of the 20th century’s most important photographers and an instrumental filmmaker who forged new paths based on his perceptions as a Black man, a witness to racism, inequality and social injustice, oppression and repression, but also to North American Black people’s struggles for emancipation and the conquest of civil rights, which he embraced and spearheaded.

This exhibition is the result of a partnership between Instituto Moreira Salles and The Gordon Parks Foundation (USA). It underscores IMS’s aim to present key figures in world photography history in Brazil, in a dialogue addressing issues and themes that can contribute to specific reflections and interpretations within the Brazilian context. Both institutions are aware that this project reaffirms their collections’ contribution to a reinterpretation of their respective countries’ histories.

Instituto Moreira Salles and the Gordon Parks Foundation express their gratitude to Janaína Damaceno, the project’s curator, and to Iliriana Fontoura Rodrigues, assistant curator, for their enthusiasm, research, ideas, and for all their extraordinary work and dedication. We also highlight the participation of Sergio Burgi, photography coordinator at IMS, to whom we express our gratitude. Thanks are due to Pamela Oliveira, the chronology’s author, and Maria Luiza Menezes, curatorial assistant. The two institutions’ gratitude is further extended to everyone in each institution who has contributed to a project that will give rise to a wider reception of Gordon Parks’ work, and to new interpretations of his work both in the specific contexts of Brazil and the USA, as well as in the broader international context.

The Board of Instituto Moreira Salles

Born Restless. Gordon Parks

When Gordon Parks (1912–2006) photographed Joanne and Shirley, looking beautiful in their Sunday best, under a neon sign that read “Colored Entrance” in the segregated city of Mobile, Alabama, he created one of the 20th century’s most iconic images. The sign and the photograph’s framing symbolize America’s racist and segregationist structure, reflected in the architectural forms and design that supported racial segregation (1877–1965). Nonetheless, this image also reveals how Black people challenged a system that sought their annihilation. By claiming their right to exist fully, Joanne and Shirley, proud in their Sunday clothes, exemplify what Tina Campt (2017) calls the practice of refusing the precarity of life. To understand the powerful visual archive Parks created, you need to do more than just look at his work. You need to become attuned, let yourself be affected, listen to his images, which were produced at a time when most representations of Black people were dehumanizing, and understand how he also fought against a precarious life by producing respectable images of Black people.

This exhibition’s title is inspired by a text written by Parks and published in Life magazine in 1968. He had photographed the day-to-day life of the Fontenelle Family, a Black family living in extreme poverty in Harlem, and wrote as if he were one of its members: “I too am America. America is me. It gave me the only life I know – so I must share in its survival. Look at me. Listen to me. Try to understand my struggle against your racism. There is yet a chance for us to live in peace beneath these restless skies.” (Gordon Parks, “A Harlem Family”, Life, March 8, 1968).

It is an honor to present the largest Gordon Parks exhibition ever held in Latin America. Creator of some of the 20th century’s most iconic images, such as American Gothic, Parks was a talented multi-artist who saw photography as a powerful weapon to combat social injustices such as racism and racial segregation. His work still resonates today when we think about the limits of democracy and citizenship in the contemporary world.

His career as a photographer began in 1938, in the African-American press. He worked at important institutions, such as the Farm Security Administration’s photography department, and publications before achieving widespread fame as the first African-American photographer at the renowned Life magazine, where he worked for over two decades.

The exhibition Gordon Parks: America Is Me offers a panoramic and unique view of the photographer’s work, highlighting the main series he produced from the 1940s to the 1970s, with an emphasis on his view of Black people’s lives in the United States. We thereby wish for you to appreciate both the breadth of Parks’ work and understand the context and logic behind his serial photographic production.

On the eighth floor, images taken in the 1940s and 1950s are on display, while on the seventh floor, his work from 1961 to 1970 is exhibited, including the iconic photograph A Great Day for Hip-Hop, taken in 1998.

In addition to his photography, Gordon Parks played a key role in the history of cinema, becoming the first Black person to direct a film (The Learning Tree, 1969) at a major Hollywood studio. He also directed Shaft (1971), the flagship film of the genre then known as blaxploitation. Being the country where Parks made his first film, Flavio (1964), Brazil played a significant role in his audiovisual production. This short film was based on a controversial report about the Da Silva family that he wrote as a Life magazine special correspondent in Brazil in 1961. The report caused outrage in the national press by internationally exposing the poverty of the family living in Rio de Janeiro’s Catacumba slum, prompting a response from O Cruzeiro magazine and resulting in a clash between the two publications that became known as the “Flávio Affair”.

Except for Vantoen Pereira Jr.’s images of Parks’ visit to Brazil in 2000, all other photographs are courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation, which holds the copyright to them.

We invite you to do more than just see; we invite you to also listen to Parks’ images and let yourself be affected by their frequencies.

Janaina Damaceno, curator
Iliriana Fontoura Rodrigues, assistant curator

Washington, D.C., 1942

In 1942, with the financial backing of a grant for Black artists, Parks was able to intern for a year in the photography department of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a US government agency created to help small farmers. The photography department documented the living conditions of Americans during the Great Depression, both in rural and urban areas. It was a milestone in the history of documentary photography. Important photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, and Carl Mydans worked there.

When Parks arrived in Washington, D.C., his boss, Roy Stryker, asked him to stow his equipment and go experience the city. After a day of being kicked out and barred from entering restaurants and movie theaters, and shopping in department stores, Parks understood that the American capital was, in fact, “a Southern city”. Stryker told him that he needed to translate this visually and asked him to talk to Ella Watson, a cleaning lady, to understand how she experienced racism, and their encounter turned into one of the most important photos in American history.

Upon seeing the photo, Stryker asked Parks if he wanted to get them all fired and did not publish it. American Gothic was only published six years later, in 1948, in Ebony Magazine, an important Black publication. In the photograph, Ella Watson holds a broom on one side and a mop on the other with the American flag behind her, expressing the second-class citizenship experienced by the African-American community.

Parks continued to document Ella’s everyday life for another two weeks, following to the letter one of Stryker’s guidelines; Stryker did not believe that a single image could tell a whole story and therefore encouraged the creation of more comprehensive photographic series. This would also become a hallmark of Parks’ work, which focused more on constructing sequential narratives than on single images.

New York, 1943-1948/1971

Harlem featured significantly in Parks’ personal and professional history. He first encountered the neighborhood in 1933 when he was a musician with Larry Funk’s Orchestra, which disbanded as soon as it arrived in New York. With little money, he moved to Harlem, the destination of thousands of people fleeing racial segregation in the South.

When he returns to Harlem a decade later as a photographer of the Office of War Information (OWI) – the United States’ war propaganda department, Parks begins to document the neighborhood’s effervescent life.

In this space, you will discover Gordon Parks’ Harlem through images he took between 1943 and 1948 of everyday scenes in the neighborhood, from the series Harlem Gang Leader (1948) and The Invisible Man (1952), a collaboration between him and writer Ralph Ellison, to Shaft (1971), the iconic blaxploitation film that revolutionized the history of American cinema. Yes, Parks was the director of Shaft!

New York, 1971

The most important film of his career as a filmmaker and the flagship film of the genre then known as blaxploitation, Shaft (1971) was directed by Gordon Parks. Set in Harlem, the film follows Black detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) as he attempts to rescue the daughter of a crime boss from the mafia. Shaft is tough, handsome, and doesn’t take any crap. At the same time, he is quite violent, even with some of his girlfriends, which led to the film receiving varied criticism, including that it reinforced stereotypes vis-à-vis the hypersexuality and violence of Black men.

Shaft was also a milestone for Isaac Hayes’ music, winning him an Oscar for Best Original Song for the film’s theme song. A worldwide success, the film also influenced Black youth in Brazil, and in Rio de Janeiro, Filó Filho and his friends created Noites do Shaft [Shaft Nights], soul-themed Black dance parties that drew huge crowds, as we can see in films such as Emilio Domingues’ Black Rio! Black Power! (2023).

“Blaxploitation is cinema that responds to its time, a genre composed of films that remove Black people from supporting roles as servants and idealize the figure of the hero. Attractive, desirable, daring men (Richard Roundtree, Melvin Van Peebles) and women (Tamara Dobson, Pam Grier) who flirt, immerse themselves in or work with the law and marginality. Characters reflecting a romanticization of the inversion of the status quo: police officers, the tip of the iceberg of oppression, are the most trampled upon in blaxploitation. […] It is cinema of revenge, humor, and anger. Brazenly open and honest in its weaknesses. Imperfect cinema that pulsates.” (Heitor Augusto, “Blaxploitation: o gênero que obrigou o mundo a notar os negros”, 2011.)

Harlem, New York, 1952

More than just a one-off collaboration, this series reveals the friendship between Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison. The duo’s second project (the first was never published), it was produced as a promotional feature in Life magazine for Ellison’s just-published book, Invisible Man, one of the most important works in the history of American literature. In the novel, an anonymous young Black man from the “Deep South” goes to New York after being expelled from college. When he realizes that he is invisible to most people, he decides to live in the abandoned basement of a building inhabited by White people. There, hidden from everyone, he does not have to pay the bill for his 1,369 light bulbs, and his home becomes the brightest place in the entire city, a place where he can take refuge. While addressing the social and psychological effects of racism, Invisible Man speaks of the possibility of each of us dreaming of achievable destinies.

In his photography, Parks interprets emblematic passages from the book, but also extrapolates when, for example, he photographs the story’s protagonist coming out of a manhole and observing the city.

Outside Ellison and Gordon’s refuge, we see images that set the essay in Harlem and depict the protagonist with his suitcase at the train station, as well as one of his persecutory nightmares.

Fort Scott, Kansas, 1950

In 1950, Life magazine assigned Parks to cover a story on school segregation in Kansas. Born in Fort Scott, a town in that state, Parks decided to talk about the impact of segregated education on his generation and, to that end, he decided to seek out his classmates from the Plaza School’s graduating class of 1927.

That year, he and his 11 classmates completed the Middle School. The report was never published, but it became one of Gordon Parks’ most beautiful photographic series. Most of the images in this series were made public in 2015, through Karen Haas’ research for an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in partnership with The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Upon returning to Fort Scott, Parks discovered that ten of his colleagues had migrated, and that only one of them remained in the city but wished to migrate. They were refugees of the South’s segregationist policies in cities such as Chicago and Detroit.

Although migration was the best solution to escape the evils of segregation, it did not free them from other situations that stemmed from racism.

Chicago, Illinois

To escape the harmful effects of racial segregation, more than six million Black people left rural areas in the South and sought refuge in cities in the North, West, and Midwest of the United States, where there were more opportunities and less violence. This period became known as the Great Migration (1910-1970). Before Harlem, Chicago’s South and West Sides were important destinations for these immigrants. It is no coincidence that The Chicago School, the country’s leading center for urban studies, was established there, researching the adaptation of rural Black migrants to the urban environment, for example.

Chicago played an important role in Parks’ artistic development. During the years he worked for the Northern Railroad as a porter, he had the opportunity to get to know the city and visit the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the world’s most important museums, on several occasions.

He lived in Chicago between 1941 and 1942 and befriended Black artists such as Charles White, held exhibitions, and maintained a photography studio at the Southside Community Art Center. With the photographs he took of Chicago’s South Side, he won a scholarship that led him to the Farm Security Administration, which changed his life. When he returned to the city 13 years after that experience, he knew well what it meant to photograph the Missionary Baptist Church.

Fort Scott, Kansas, 1969

In 1969, Gordon Parks directed The Learning Tree, his first feature film. Based on his homonymous semi-autobiographical novel published in 1963, the film tells the story of Newt Winger, a 14-year-old Black teenager living in Cherokee Flats, in segregated Kansas, in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Learning Tree’s soundtrack was composed by Parks, including the opening theme you are listening to! Here, we can see Gordon’s unique talent as a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and musician.

The title The Learning Tree refers to a conversation Parks had with his mother, who told him that he needed to view life and the town of Fort Scott as a tree that bears both good and bad fruit, and that even the bad fruit would teach him something in the future.

“But you can learn just as much here about people and things as you can learn any place. Cherokee Flats is sorta like a fruit tree. Some people are good and some of them are bad – just like the fruit on a tree ... Well, if you learn to profit from the good and bad these people do to each other, you’ll learn a lot ‘bout life. And you’ll be a better man for that learnin’ some day … No matter if you go or stay, think of it like that till the day you die – let it be your learnin’ tree.”

Gordon Parks, The Learning Tree, 1963.

1963-1970

Like Brazil’s Black movements, the North American Black Power/Black Liberation Movements comprise a multitude of organizations that approach Black activism in different ways. Therefore, generalizations about these movements can be quite simplistic and fail to express the complexity of Black political agency. In this room, we can see expressions of North American Black activism, symbolized in four great leaders portrayed by Gordon Parks: Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), Malcolm X (1925-1965), Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998), and Eldridge Cleaver (1935-1998).

Washington, D.C., 1963

With more than 250,000 people in attendance, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, better known as simply the March on Washington, was one of the most important political events in American history. It took place in front of the Lincoln Memorial – a monument honoring the president who, in 1863, signed the Emancipation Proclamation (the equivalent of Brazil’s Lei de Abolição, or Abolition Law). One hundred years after emancipation, the African-American Civil Rights Movement denounced the fact that Black communities still lived in terrible conditions and under the thumb of segregation and racism. The march ultimately influenced the signing of the Civil Rights Act (1964), which ended racial segregation, prohibited discrimination based on color, race, religion, or nationality and promoted racial equality and the right to vote. It was at this march that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Parks’ photos were published alongside those of other photographers in Life magazine’s special report of the event.

King believed that the struggle for civil rights should be based on the principle of nonviolence, so that it would become clear who the racists in American society were. He also believed in racial integration, in a society of equal rights where Blacks and Whites could live in peace.

1963

Parks was selected by Life to photograph and write about the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim organization that emerged in 1930. It was not an easy task. Elijah Muhammad, its leader, had already rebuffed several White journalists. When he learned that Parks worked for Life, he asked him, “Why does a bright young man like you work for the white devils?” In the end, Parks gained the leadership’s approval, produced one of his most notable reports, and developed such a deep relationship with Malcolm X that they became like family.

In Black Muslims, Parks presents us with a broad look at the Nation of Islam’s activities and the Malcolm X’s trajectory. converted to Islam while still in prison, Malcolm X believed neither in Luther King Jr.’s policy of nonviolence nor in the idea of integration. For him, Black people’s self-determination would come about through a revolution over land, since land was necessary to build a Black nation.

In his speech “Message to the Grass Roots” (1963), Malcolm X expresses his disagreement with the March on Washington and with King, whom he compares to an Uncle Tom, resigned and integrationist.

1966

It was also at Life’s request that Parks documented Black Panther leaders such as Stokely Carmichael in 1966 and 1967, and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver in 1970.

Stokely Carmichael was the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) when he began using the slogan that would soon become a movement: Black Power. Gradually, he came to believe that the idea of nonviolence was a way of obstructing the anti-racist struggle, since the real violence came from the racist White society. He began to advocate the use of violence and condemned the idea of Black integration into American society. In his view, the focus should be on overthrowing the white supremacist system, and so, together with other young people, he ended up founding the Black Panther Party, with whom he cut ties in 1969, changing his name from Stokely Carmichael to Kwame Turé. At this point, Kwame understood that the Black struggle was transnational, and he championed Pan-Africanism. Years later, in 1986, he visited Brazil at the invitation of the IPCN (Instituto de Pesquisas da Cultura Negra [Black Cultures Research Institute]) and went to the region where Quilombo dos Palmares was located, in the Serra da Barriga mountains in the State of Alagoas.

1970

Stokely Carmichael’s break with the Black Panthers can be traced through the letters exchanged between Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers’ minister of information. Though they had similar ideas, one of the main disagreements between them was that Stokely did not support any kind of alliance between Black and White organizations, while the Black Panthers saw this as strategic in the global anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggle.

Cleaver also points out that the Black Power movement had been co-opted by the capitalist agenda, and that Carmichael resented the fact that the Black Panthers had internationalist, Marxist-Leninist leanings that extended beyond the struggle based solely on skin color or Black nationalism.

New York, 1967

In 1967, Parks was assigned to report on the reasons behind the protests by Black youth, particularly the Black Panthers. His editors did not understand why they were so radical since the Civil Rights Act had already been signed.

Parks decided that the best way to show the reasons for the uprising was to publicize the living conditions of Black people in the country’s largest city. And so, he returned to Harlem and documented the life of the Fontenelle family, who lived in extreme poverty, as did many other Black families in the neighborhood and nationwide.

The Black Power movement was protesting because the Black communities were hungry and cold.

“What I want. What I am. What you force me to be is what you are. For I am you, staring back from a mirror of poverty and despair, of revolt and freedom. Look at me and know that to destroy me is to destroy yourself. You are weary of the long summers. I am tired of the long hungered winters. We are not so far apart as it might seem. There is something about both of us that goes deeper than blood or black and white. It is our common search for a better life, a better world. I march now over the same ground you once marched. I fight for the same things you still fight for. My children’s needs are the same as your children’s. I too am America. America is me. It gave me the only life I know – so I must share in its survival. Look at me. Listen to me. Try to understand my struggle against your racism. There is yet a chance for us to live in peace beneath these restless skies.”

Gordon Parks, Life, 1968.

1961

In 1961, Gordon Parks came to Brazil at the request of Life magazine to document life in Rio’s favelas. For several weeks, he followed the day-to-day life of the Da Silva family, who had migrated from the Northeast to Rio de Janeiro, with a particular focus on their son Flávio, who suffered from chronic bronchitis. In response to the article, the family received donations from the magazine’s readers and bought a house in the suburbs, and Flávio was taken to the United States to treat his illness. The case had a major impact on the Brazilian press, and O Cruzeiro magazine sent photographer Henri Ballot to do a story on poverty in Harlem.

Brazilian press accused Parks of not standing in solidarity with his community by portraying poverty through the face of a White child. There were even those who published that they would bring a Black child from Harlem to live as a white person in Brazil. Showing our poverty through the story of a White boy (for us, but Latino for them) was seen as an attack.

In addition to the report, Parks also made his first film, Flavio (1964). Narrated in the first person using a boy’s voice, the short film is part of the history of Black diaspora cinema. It is one of the first films directed by a Black man on Brazilian soil.

The exhibition features Parks’ previously unseen images in Brazil: children playing ball at Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon and an evangelical worship service. For someone who had documented the African-American church on numerous occasions, it was an opportunity to capture a temple attended mainly by Black people.

In 2018, Instituto Moreira Salles held the exhibition The Flávio Affair.

Miami, Florida

London, England, 1966/1970

As a journalist, Parks had the opportunity to document the stories of anonymous individuals, but also of stars like Muhammad Ali (1942-2016) who fought against white supremacy, inequality, and poverty. Not only was Ali one of history’s greatest athletes, he was also a courageous anti-racist activist who lost everything, including his world championship title, after refusing to serve in the Vietnam War.

A convert to Islam and member of the Nation of Islam, Ali was 25-years-old and opposed the war because he believed it was unjust and a means of expanding American imperialism against non-White peoples. He also pointed out the irony of sending young Black men to fight for democracy in Vietnam when they did not even experience it in their own country.

In this series, we witness the meeting of two legends who teach us that no matter what we do in life, there is always room to fight for justice.

The Black Muslim Ali used to say: “I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me – Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”

Harlem, New York , 1998

Gordon Parks’ photograph for the cover of XXL Magazine, one of the world’s most important hip-hop magazines, is iconic! It pays homage to Art Kane’s photograph A Great Day in Harlem (1958), which brings together 57 jazz stars in front of the building at 17 East 126th Street in East Harlem.

In Parks’ image, we can see some of the biggest names in hip-hop, such as Grandmaster Flash, Slick Rick, The Roots, and Da Brat among the 117 figures portrayed.

The photo is a temporal link between jazz and hip-hop, two ultimate expressions of African-American culture. Perhaps Parks saw himself in these young people. 65 years earlier, he had arrived in Harlem for the first time, trying to fulfill his dream of becoming a musician. Like many young rappers, he had to break the law to survive, but there he was, alive, like them, 65 years later.

Mobile and Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956

In this series, Parks follows the day-to-day life of the Causey and Thornton families in rural Alabama. Taking photographs in that State meant running a real risk of death. Parks was even persecuted and threatened by white supremacist groups. At the end of his assignment, he had to flee Mobile when he discovered that an ambush had been planned against him and his assistant. Understanding these images, which blend beauty (of everyday life, family relationships, love, and affection) with the horrors of segregation requires great sensitivity so that the horrors are not romanticized and the idea that segregation was something minor is not believed. While Parks was producing these images, people were being lynched, Black children were being stoned as they walked to desegregated schools, and interracial marriages were banned in much of the country.

The plethora of signs separating equipment and entrances for Black and White people shows that there were logistics, architecture, and design devised for segregation. They are also visual landmarks that represent the racist structure as a backdrop for how Black and White individuals were expected to navigate society.

During this period, photojournalism was still dominated by black-and-white images. By producing color photographs of Black families’ everyday lives, Gordon sought to bring Life’s readers closer to the real lives of these flesh-and-blood people, showing that within the colorful banality of everyday life, everyone, Black and White, was irrevocably human. And that was a major affront to the system of racial segregation.

The Thorntons and the Causeys were hard-working people who dreamed of the possibility of social advancement. The impact of the publication of a story about their lives in Life magazine was devastating. Some lost their jobs, were stripped of their possessions and harassed by White residents for saying they would like to live in an integrated society, and had to move to another city. Dreaming of justice came at a very high price for them.