Gordon Parks | Pace Gallery
Gordon Parks, Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.
Written by: Max Weiner
The delicate empathy of Gordon Parks’s photography is beautifully exhibited at Los Angeles’s Pace Gallery.
Gordon Parks is one of those rare and effortlessly poignant voices that comes around once in a generation. His talent behind the lens can be quantified by his yield: smoothly nuanced with an uncanny ability to capture a vivid zeitgeist. Because of his skillset, his praise is boundless, and at the Pace Gallery in Los Angeles we see exactly why he is lauded as one of the finest artists of his generation. The exhibition features photographs that span forty years of Parks’s career, the majority of the works displaying the deep care and empathy with which he approached his craft. Each image tells a rich story using only a lens, and only a master is capable of such. Parks’s work can be seen at Pace beginning on July 12 and has a scheduled closing date of August 30.
Gordon Parks, The Invisible Man, Harlem, New York, 1952. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.
Parks’s work shows a very unique portrayal of the American psyche during a time of significant change for the country. Getting his start during the macabre of World War II, Parks showed an America — predominantly its African American population — on the cusp of some of the most pivotal moments in world history. With his photographs, he strived to combat the many strifes of the world and the daily injustices of a segregated America. His lens paints humans as equal creatures in everyone’s eyes, with stories that everyone deserves to hear.
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Chicago, Illinois, 1957. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.
Some of Parks’s finest images will be exhibited at Pace, including Baptism, Chicago, Illinois (1953), which dives into his fascination with documenting Black spirituality and worship. The image is as haunting as it is beautiful, and one must fully absorb its tremendous depth by looking into the eyes of each of his precisely placed subjects. None are looking into the lens directly, yet their aura commands our attention like magnets to the soul. Each person captured within the frame tells a different story on different spiritual levels. The woman being baptized looks literally reborn, showing no control over the muscles in her face as she emerges from the water. The others stand before her humbled by the presence of a holy spirit, truly amazed by the act they have just witnessed. Parks layers their gazes so masterfully that we find our eyes darting around the image, trying to absorb each subject with equal effort. It’s one of the finest works not just in this series, but in Parks’s career as a whole.
Gordon Parks did his duty of highlighting the beauty of the everyman like no other photographer. In his work we see someone who truly cares about the human condition, and his namesake Foundation only further proves this incredible sentiment. In an age where so much is focused on the self, let us look to someone like Gordon Parks to inspire us to divert our gaze outwards. We all have our own voices and stories. Let us open our minds with curiosity and allow each other to hear them.
Gordon Parks, Untitled, North Carolina, 1985. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.
