Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967 honours the
legacy and the work of late iconic artist and
photojournalist Gordon Parks, who would have turned 100
on November 30, 2012. The exhibition catalogue is
co-published by The Studio Museum in Harlem and The
Gordon Parks Foundation and features approximately
eighty black and white photographs of the Fontenelle
family, whose lives Gordon Parks documented as part of a
1968 Life magazine photo essay. A searing portrait of
poverty in the United States, the Fontenelle photographs
provide a view of Harlem through the narrative of a
specific family at a particular moment in time. Gordon
Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort
Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant labourer, he worked
as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other
jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training
himself, and becoming a photographer. In addition to his
storied tenures at the Farm Security Administration, the
Office of War Information (19[zasłonięte]945) and Life magazine
(19[zasłonięte]972), Parks was a modern-day Renaissance man who
found success as a film director, author and composer.
The first African-American director to helm a major
motion picture, he popularised the Blaxploitation genre
through his film Shaft (1971). He wrote numerous
memoirs, novels and books of poetry and received many
awards, including the National Medal of Arts and more
than fifty honorary degrees. In 1997 the Corcoran
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., mounted his
retrospective exhibition Half Past Autumn: The Art of
Gordon Parks. Parks died in 2006.
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