Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950

During the 1940s American photographer Gordon Parks (1912-2006) grew from a self-taught photographer making portraits and documenting everyday life in Saint Paul and Chicago to a visionary professional shooting for Ebony, Vogue, Fortune, and Life. 

For the first time, the formative decades of Parks’s 60-year career are the focus of an exhibition, which brings together 120 photographs and ephemera—including magazines, books, letters, and family pictures. The exhibition will illustrate how Parks’s early experiences at the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, and Standard Oil (New Jersey) as well as his close relationships with Roy Stryker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, helped shape his groundbreaking style. A fully illustrated catalog, with extensive new research and previously unpublished images, will accompany the exhibition

redit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image: Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1941, gelatin silver print, Private Collection. Courtesy of and © The Gordon Parks Foundation

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Gordon Parks: The New Tide: Early Work 1940–1950, brings together photographs and publications made during the first and most formative decade of his 65-year career. Focusing on new research and access to forgotten pictures, The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 documents the importance of these years in shaping Gordon Parks' passionate vision. During the 1940s Parks' photographic ambitions grew to express a profound understanding of his cultural and political experiences. From the first photographs he published in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and his relationship to the Chicago Black Renaissance, to his mentorship with Roy Stryker and his breakthrough work for America's influential picture magazines―including Ebony and Life―this book traces Parks' rapid evolution from an accomplished, self-taught practitioner to a groundbreaking artistic and journalistic voice.

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