Issue No. 28 – Control

What is the nature of control? The desire for it—and to be free of it—are essential parts of both life and art.

The Archives: Gordon Parks

The Archives: Gordon Parks

Drinking Foundations, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

Drinking Foundations, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

For “The Restraints,” Parks followed three Alabaman families during the 1950s, at what was both the height and turning point of de jure segregation in the South. Jim Crow was still firmly in place, but what Parks’ photographs evidence is the fact that around this time, it was beginning to be seriously examined and questioned. The Thorton, Causey, and Tanner families are not among the cannon figures of the Civil Rights mythos, nor will these scenes of them buying ice cream, clothes shopping, or relaxing at home likely become part of the historical narrative of the movement. However, what Parks offers is something that bears an important relation to historical drama. Parks reveals how segregation was experienced on the level of the everyday, through the personal narratives of these three families. Whereas history casts a reductive eye on events, pitting protagonists against antagonists, with a clear set of themes, motives, and vocabulary terms, lived experience is much less sensational. Parks’ photographs not only show how public spaces were divided but also the gray areas where these divisions prove themselves inept and absurd. History divides; Parks opens opportunities to unify.

Department Store, Mobile Alabama, 1956

Department Store, Mobile Alabama, 1956

Parks focused on the arena of the everyday, which he showed as being both a stage for subjugation and separation, but also a place where experience is shared. If part of the original purpose of Parks’ series was to bring a white audience into intimacy with the black population from which it had separated itself, to restore a human ordinariness to the lives of people exoticized by segregation, then this purpose is still relevant today if in a slightly different form. Parks’ pictures offer a sense of the mundanity of how segregation was experienced. For the people in these photographs, segregation was something engrained into their day. “White/ Colored” signs were heeded like traffic signs or, perhaps more analogously, gendered bathrooms. Part of the value of these photographs today is as a reminder that the form in which discrimination flourishes is routine. There it remains unnoticed, and therefore unquestioned and uncontested. Consider the series’ title: it not only differentiates restraints that are “open” and those that are “hidden;” it also suggests that some restraints are both “open and hidden.” Because they are so routinely encountered, they make up a default reality, and are thus openly hidden. Often, it is only in looking back after 60 years that we realize just how glaring an injustice was.

Untitled, Nashville Tennessee, 1956

Untitled, Nashville Tennessee, 1956

Borders drawn on public spaces can be redrawn; borders drawn on the consciousness of a society are not so easily undone. The signs that once divided the public across racial lines have been outlawed, but this doesn’t touch the deeper problem, which is that their message has been internalized and continues to influence the experience of people raised in this country. Segregation has not been eradicated; it has mutated into something more difficult to identify, and more difficult to photograph. Gordon Parks’ pictures may no longer reflect the exterior landscape of American public space, but they have gained value as X-rays of a country still sick with the legacy of its racist policies. Understanding Parks’ photographs means not sanctioning them off to a departed era of history. It means realizing that these seemingly departed eras are also separated by borders that don’t actually exist, and that the practices of a previous generations are not contained within them. These practices seep into the succeeding generations. By turning his camera on the everyday experience of segregation, Gordon Parks brought visibility to a social problem that was both open and hidden, something the work still has the power to do.

Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Mobile Tennesse, 1956

Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Mobile Tennesse, 1956

Untitled, Mobile Alabama, 1956

Untitled, Mobile Alabama, 1956

To read the full article on Gordon Parks in our Controversy click here.

Found in Nature: Barry Rosenthal Interview

Found in Nature: Barry Rosenthal Interview

 Elinor Carucci and "Cat Person"

Elinor Carucci and "Cat Person"