Exhibition Review: A Choice of Weapons Gordon Parks
Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1948 © The Gordon Parks Foundation
By Zoha Baquar
One of the world’s leading galleries for classic and modern photography, Howard Greenberg Gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary and the opening of its new gallery on the 8th floor of Manhattan’s Fuller Building with Gordon Parks: A Choice of Weapons, a simultaneous display of the eminent photographer and filmmaker’s photojournalism and cinematic legacy.
Gordon Parks (1912-2006) described his camera as his “choice of weapons,” employing it to document American life and culture with a focus on social justice, race relations, the civil rights movement, economic decline, and the African American experience in the face of all of these realities. His most groundbreaking works in relation to these themes emerged in the two decades following his employment as a staff photographer for Life magazine in 1948.
Untitled, Chicago, Illinois, 1957 © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks: A Choice of Weapons is a selection of Parks’ photographs from Harlem and Chicago. Interestingly, with the gallery’s display of photographs from these two cities, two distinct styles within Parks’ work emerge in front of the viewer. The artist’s images shot in Harlem are documentary: largely but not exclusively black and white, and with subjects like the struggling Fontanelle family and New York gang leader “Red” Jackson, these images show interior and exterior scenes of poverty, roughhousing, labour, crime, demonstrations against the police state, as well as community bonds and relationships that develop within these stricken conditions.
Contrastingly and predominantly chromogenic rather than black and white, Parks’ images from Chicago appear more closely tied to cinema, with close-up as well as aerial perspectives, hazy and overblown lights, and dark silhouettes. It’s as if Harlem is loud and Chicago is quiet, or that Halem is overt and Chicago is covert in the way the complexities of his subjects’ lives are revealed. In both cases, Parks’ principle effort to “complicate presumptions around criminality and representation,” as exhibition curator of Parks’ work at MoMA Sarah Meister puts it, remains.
Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1948 © The Gordon Parks Foundation
The cinematography of these Chicago images lies in tandem with Parks’ pioneering efforts in film, with the artist’s photography and film intimately informing one another, both visually and thematically. In 1969, Parks launched his film career as the first African American to write and direct a studio feature with The Learning Tree, based on his semi-autobiographical novel. A Choice of Weapons also coincides with the 50th anniversary of the release of Parks’ second feature-length film, the blaxploitation classic Shaft (1971), the release of the HBO documentary A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks in November, as well as the extended presentation of works from his series The Atmosphere of Crime in the permanent collection galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1948 © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. states, “Gordon Parks is the most important Black photographer in the history of photojournalism. Long after the events that he photographed have been forgotten, his images will remain with us, testaments to the genius of his art, transcending time, place and subject matter.” This is true. Looking at Parks’ works today in A Choice of Weapons, which displays relatively sober images to the more evocative and provocative images in the rest of the artist’s oeuvre, the viewer finds the repetition of history, of difficulty and decline, of precarity and racism, and the power of photography to move you to want and act differently.
Gordon Parks: A Choice of Weapons is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery’s new gallery on the 8th floor of the Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street, from October 2 to December 23, 2021.
