Naming Moments Properly

Gordon Parks (1912– ) is one of the most provocative and celebrated photojournalists in the United States. His gripping images of such celebrities as Duke Ellington, Gloria Vanderbilt, Muhammad Ali, Ingrid Bergman, and Malcom X helped to make these famous people into enduring elements of American iconography. An icon in his own right, he is perhaps best known as the pioneering director of the 1970s blockbuster Shaft, and his overriding legacy is probably Essence magazine, which he helped launch during the turbulent Black Power movement. The subjects of some of his most moving and poignant images, however, were everyday, hard-working “people without history” who would have been erased from the historical record had he not artfully and thoughtfully crafted their images on gelatin silver prints. He first shot these subjects for the Farm Security Administration during the 1940s, and Parks often wrote “crafty” and pointed editorial commentary that he appended to these photographs as rather lengthy captions or titles for his work. In Parks’ own words, he was trying to document “moments without proper names” (Parks 1975:128). Gordon Parks was born in Kansas in 1912, the youngest of fifteen children. Parks’ terminally ill mother arranged for him to stay with his oldest sister in Minneapolis when he was 15 years old (Moskowitz 2003:102). Talented on many fronts but desperately poor, Parks worked hard to support himself by doing everything from playing the piano to playing basketball. At the age of 25 he began to seriously consider photography as a career and talked his way into photographing models for Frank Murphy’s, a fashionable women’s boutique in St. Paul. He was “discovered” by none other than Marva Louis—wife of the famous boxer Joe Louis—who convinced him to move to Chicago to hone his craft and make more money. It was in Chicago where he became part of the legendary South Side Community Arts Center, which birthed the so-called Chicago Renaissance during the 1940s. Rivaling in historic import Harlem in the 1920s, it was an important period when luminary artists and scholars such as Katherine Dunham, St. Clair Drake, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Catlett, Richard Wright, and Nat King Cole flourished amid one another’s creative genius. Parks’ artistic expression was quickly recognized, and the Julius Rosenwald Foundation awarded him one of their prestigious fellowships. As a Rosenwald Fellow, Parks joined the ranks of some of the twentieth century’s most influential artists and intellectuals: Marian Anderson, Augusta Savage, Katherine Dunham, James Baldwin, John Hope Franklin, Jacob Lawrence, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Bunche. By 1942, he was working closely with Roy Stryker, who headed the historical section of the Farm Security Administration. He joined Stryker’s impressive team of photographers who captured thousands of stunning images of everyday life during the Depression and the early years of World War II (Norton Museum of Art 1999). The image on the cover of Transforming Anthropology was shot during one of his first assignments for the FSA, and it has endured as one of his signature images. Purposefully posed as an ironic counterpart to Grant Wood’s famous American Gothic, it is part of a touching photo essay that documented the textured and taxing life of Ella Watson, a government charwoman (housekeeper). According to Gordon Parks,