DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- West Wing -- Exhibit: Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950:
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Description of Pictures: Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950
November 4, 2018 – February 18, 2019
During the 1940s American photographer Gordon Parks (1912–2006) grew from a self-taught photographer making portraits and documenting everyday life in Saint Paul and Chicago to a visionary professional shooting for Ebony, Vogue, Fortune, and Life. For the first time, the formative decade of Parks’s 60-year career is the focus of an exhibition, which brings together 150 photographs and ephemera—including magazines, books, letters, and family pictures. The exhibition will illustrate how Parks’s early experiences at the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, and Standard Oil (New Jersey) as well as his close relationships with Roy Stryker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, helped shape his groundbreaking style. A fully illustrated catalog, with extensive new research and previously unpublished images, will accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition is curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
NGAPRK_181207_07.JPG: Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950
NGAPRK_181207_11.JPG: "I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera."
-- Gordon Parks, 1999
NGAPRK_181207_14.JPG: A Choice of Weapons
Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Chicago
NGAPRK_181207_18.JPG: Gordon Parks
Death of Babe Ruth. Inside Yankee Stadium, New York City., August 1948
NGAPRK_181207_26.JPG: Gordon Parks
Ingrid Bergman, Stromboli, Italy, 1949
NGAPRK_181207_33.JPG: Gordon Parks
Dr. Fredric Wertham, New York, January 1949
Born in 1895 in Nuremberg, Germany, noted psychiatrist Wertham stated the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, which provided free mental health services to the community.
Fredric Wertham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fredric Wertham (March 20, 1895 – November 18, 1981) was a German-American psychiatrist and author. Wertham had an early reputation as a progressive psychiatrist who treated poor black patients at his Lafargue Clinic when mental health services for blacks were uncommon due to racialist psychiatry. Wertham also authored a definitive textbook on the brain, and his institutional stressor findings were cited when courts overturned multiple segregation statutes, most notably in Brown v. Board of Education.
Despite this, Wertham remains best known for his concerns about the effects of violent imagery in mass media and the effects of comic books on the development of children. His best-known book is Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which asserted that comic books caused youth to become delinquents. Besides Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham also wrote articles and testified before government inquiries into comic books, most notably as part of a U.S. Congressional inquiry into the comic book industry. Wertham's work, in addition to the 1954 comic book hearings led to creation of the Comics Code, although later scholars cast doubt on his observations.
NGAPRK_181207_40.JPG: Gordon Parks
Roy Emerson Stryker, c. 1947
Roy Stryker
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Roy Emerson Stryker (November 5, 1893 – September 27, 1975) was an American economist, government official, and photographer. He headed the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression, and launched the documentary photography movement of the FSA.
NGAPRK_181207_48.JPG: Gordon Parks
Lt. George Knox, Flight Operations Officer, was graduated from the University of Indiana,in the Middle West., October 1943
NGAPRK_181207_53.JPG: Gordon Parks
Washington, D.C. Marian Anderson broadcasting a Negro spiritual at the dedication of a mural installed in the United States Department of the Interior building, commemorating the outdoor concert which she gave at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to sing in Constitution Hall., January 1943
NGAPRK_181207_58.JPG: Gordon Parks
Ed Parkhurst, Esso dealer. Unity, Maine., January 1944
NGAPRK_181207_68.JPG: Gordon Parks
Washington, DC
Government charwoman
July 1942
To celebrate America's first Independence Day during World War II, three hundred magazines printed the nation's flag on their covers. Made just weeks later, this iconic portrait depicts Ella Watson at work, posed before a flag hanging in a government office. The power of Parks's picture lies in his careful juxtaposition of symbols: the patriotic stars and stripes, here slightly blurred, and the sharply focused, stoic cleaning woman, unable to advance in a segregated country that nonetheless requires her support in a time of war. Government charwoman was first published by Ebony in March 1948 and years later Parks titled it American Gothic, referring to Grant Wood's famous painting of midwestern farmers. The work recalls a panel from Jacob Lawrence's epic Migration Series, which similarly evokes the dignity of working African American women. Parks likely would have been familiar with Lawrence's work, which was published in Fortune in 1941 and exhibited the following year at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington.
NGAPRK_181207_72.JPG: Gordon Parks
Langston Hughes (with frame), Chicago, December 1941
NGAPRK_181207_76.JPG: Gordon Parks
Washington (southwest section), D.C. Negro children in the front door of their home., November 1942
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