© Gordon Parks, 1956, Segregation Series - PART 1 / find PART 2 here

Gordon Parks took these pictures on assignment for a September 1956 Life magazine photo-essay, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” which documented the everyday activities and rituals of one extended black family living in the rural South under Jim Crow segregation.

While 20 photographs were eventually published in Life, the bulk of Mr. Parks’s work from that shoot was thought to have been lost. That is, until this spring, when the Gordon Parks Foundation discovered more than 70 color transparencies at the bottom of an old storage box, wrapped in paper and masking tape and marked, “Segregation Series.”

These quiet, compelling photographs elicit a reaction that Mr. Parks believed was critical to the undoing of racial prejudice: empathy. Throughout his career, he endeavored to help viewers, white and black, to understand and share the feelings of others.

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. (read more)

EXHIBITIONS

The exhibition “The Restraints: Open and Hidden”  is on view in the Lyndhurst Gallery at the Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, NC:
  »  Exhibition dates: 
Nov. 15, 2012 – Mar. 2, 2013

Another exhibition with these prints, simply called “Gordon Parks”, is on view at the Jackson Fine Art Gallery, Atlanta:
  »  Exhibition dates: 
Nov. 30, 2012 – Feb. 2, 2013

And another exhibition, called “Gordon Parks - The Segregation Portfolio”, is on view at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery, also in Atlanta:
  »  Exhibition dates: 
Nov. 30, 2012 – Feb. 2, 2013

Find previous posts about Gordon Parks here and here.

» find more exhibitions here «