“Born Black”—featuring the work of renowned photographer Gordon Parks (1912–2006)—is a modest but powerfully emotive new show at New York City’s Jack Shainman Gallery. Like much of Parks’s best work (often shot on assignment for publications like Life and Vogue), the images here are subdued, lyrical, even serene. And yet a quiet fortitude radiates from almost every print, a sense that with each person Parks has depicted on film, he has managed to catch a spark of inner dignity and human resolve.
The exhibition is a hybrid, like the multi-hyphenate Parks himself, the photographer-filmmaker-author-artist-composer-activist. Here are Civil Rights icons and unknown innocents; moments of public protest and private grace; hushed crowds and lonely mortals; pictures in high-contrast black-and-white and muted color; prints, both contemporary and vintage, mounted in frames of white and black.
The show is comprised of photographs from the long-neglected 1971 book Born Black, which have been newly collected in a lavish, expanded edition published by Steidl in association with the Gordon Parks Foundation, founded by Parks and Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., the former managing editor of Life. The new volume contains an introduction by Jelani Cobb and faithfully reprints the layouts of the original magazine photo-essays in which the images first appeared.
One aspect of the exhibition that might not be immediately apparent to a visitor is Gordon Parks’s relevance today, more than 80 years after he first began taking pictures for the Farm Security Administration. Like a handful of departed photographic masters—such as Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Helmut and June Newton (who worked under the pseudonym Alice Springs)—Parks’s place in photographic history has been nurtured by a foundation that promotes his oeuvre with vigor and savvy. And since the photographer’s death in 2006, the organization’s executive director, Peter Kunhardt Jr., and his team have been inventive and judicious in placing Parks’s legacy in a modern-day context. There have been Parks museum and gallery shows along with exquisitely printed books and monographs, retrospectives and symposia, various educational initiatives, the thriving foundation and archive (in Pleasantville, New York), and the Gordon Parks Museum (in his hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas), as well as a 2021 HBO documentary.
The capstone, however, has been the annual Parks Foundation gala—an awards ceremony, auction, and fundraising dinner—that, for attendees from the worlds of photography, journalism, fashion, film, literature, the arts, and social justice, has become one of the most inspirational nights on the social calendar since its kickoff in 2007. Each of its fellowships, scholarships, and prizes—bestowed upon students, mentees, and creative artists—are meant to reflect a different facet of Parks’s prismatic life and career. One year, Jon Batiste performs; the next, Mavis Staples. One year, honors are handed out to Ava DuVernay, Sally Mann, and Ta-Nehisi Coates; the next, to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Kehinde Wiley. (This year’s Manhattan ceremony, on May 21, will celebrate Colin Kaepernick, Myrlie Evers-Williams, Mickalene Thomas, Alicia Keys, Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean—and the late Richard Roundtree.)
Herewith, a selection of images from “Born Black,” which runs at the Jack Shainman Gallery until April 20.