The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument

About the Show

Gordon Parks was one of America’s most significant social photographers, filmmakers, and writers of the twentieth century, and the first African-American photographer to work for Life magazine. In 1948, he began a professional relationship with Life that would last twenty-two years when he proposed a series of pictures about the gang wars that were then plaguing Harlem. Parks gained the trust of one group of gang members and their leader Red Jackson, producing photographs of them that are artful, emotive, poignant, and sometimes shocking. From this larger body of work, twenty-one pictures were selected for a photo essay in Life. The exhibition comprises forty-five prints alongside contact sheets, issues of the original publication, and related ephemera that both contextualize the images chosen for the story and suggest the ways in which the editorial process shapes the narrative arc.

Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument is organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation. It is supported at Vassar by the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Exhibition Fund and the Horace Goldsmith Exhibition Fund.