Gordon Parks . I Am You

Selected Works 1934 - 1978

Gordon Parks

Broken TV screens, violence and squalor, the American civil rights movement – but the glittering world of fashion, too: from the late 1940s to the 1990s, Gordon Parks was a complex and versatile observer of American society. The first photographer to work in colour, Parks began shooting and publishing fashion series and reports for Condé Nast and Life magazine in the 1950s using white models. Parks, a renowned chronicler of the struggle for equal rights for people of colour, also portrayed the flip side of the coin – gangs in the streets of New York City, the police response to crime, a life in poverty in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, Parks shot portraits of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, other key figures of the American civil rights movement and famous artists as well, including Duke Ellington, Ingrid Bergman and Alberto Giacometti. He also embarked on an extensive body of film work starting in the 1970s, including the stories of the New-York-based private detective Shaft.