Gordon Parks: Segregation Story (Expanded Edition), published in 2014 by Steidl, is a powerful look at the struggle against racism and segregation in 1956 Alabama.
Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was an African American documentary photojournalist, fashion photographer, activist, composer, author, poet, filmmaker, painter, and magazine founder.
During the year long Montgomery bus boycott, Life magazine sent Parks to Alabama to document African Americans living under Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. Over the course of several weeks in the summer 1956, he photographed the daily life of an extended African-American family, the Causeys. His choice to use colour film (not widely used at the time in photojournalism) brings an immediacy and intimate feel to the images.
On September 24, 1956, Life magazine published a selection of 26 images as part of the photo-essay “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” The bulk of images from his assignment in 1956 was thought to have been lost. In 2011, five years after Parks’s death, The Gordon Parks Foundation discovered more than seventy color transparencies at the bottom of an old storage bin marked “Segregation Series” that are now published for the first time in The Segregation Story.
This new edition of Gordon Parks’ Segregation Story, showcases enhanced reproductions created from Parks’ original transparencies. In addition to unseen images from the series, the expanded Segregation Story includes a new essay by artist Dawoud Bey. Alongside texts from the first edition by the late art historian Maurice Berger and the esteemed journalist and civil rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
The beautiful colours and rich hues in this edition of Segregation Story, is in itself worth owning. But the story, one of dignity and perseverance, in a world segregated by skin colour, is haunting and as relevant today as it was then.
Gordon Parks summed up his photographic career of over 60 years with this pithy statement: ”
Leave a Reply