An exhibition of Gordon Parks’ rare color photographs, entitled ‘Gordon Parks: Segregation Story’, will go on view this Autumn at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The photos capture a particularly disturbing moment in American history, captured via the lives of an African American family, the Thorntons, living under Jim Crow segregation in 1950s Alabama.
The images, originally titled ‘The Restraints: Open and Hidden’, were first taken for a photo essay for Life Magazine in 1956. The essay chronicles the lesser-seen daily effects of racial discrimination, revealing how prejudice pervades even the most banal and personal of daily occurrences. Parks doesn’t photograph protests, rallies, acts of violence or momentous milestones in civil rights history. No, he prefers the quieter moments in and around the home.
‘More than anything, the ‘Segregation Series’ challenged the abiding myth of racism: that the races are innately unequal, a delusion that allows one group to declare its superiority over another by capriciously ascribing to it negative traits, abnormalities or pathologies,’ Maurice Berger wrote in The New York Times. ‘It is the very fullness, even ordinariness, of the lives of the Thornton family that most effectively contests these notions of difference, which had flourished in a popular culture that offered no more than an incomplete or distorted view of African-American life.’
No comments!
There are no comments yet, but you can be first to comment this article.