Gordon Parks is a type of photographers who actually doesn’t want a lot of an introduction. His work documenting Black life all through the US is known, making him one of the well-known Black photographers in historical past, if not in pictures normally. Mix that with the books he wrote, the films he directed, and the music he composed, and he turns into a real Renaissance man.
I don’t keep in mind precisely after I was first launched to Parks’ work. His pictures have all the time simply appeared to be at the back of my thoughts as I work by myself picture tales, and one thing I’ve all the time judged my very own work in opposition to. His books and pictures are a type of touchstones that I return to many times.
Even with Parks’ work and life being so properly documented, there are nonetheless points of it that haven’t but been absolutely explored. A brand new exhibition at Howard College, Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Spiritual Life, seems to be to broaden our insights into Parks and his works, investigating the social constructions and websites of non secular follow in his work. The exhibition frames Parks’ underexplored non secular and non secular examinations by his pictures that captured the distinguished position of faith and spirituality in Twentieth-century trendy life.
“Gordon Parks’ pictures has lengthy been a fixture within the documentation of Black life in America,” Curator Dr. Melanee Harvey writes within the press launch for the exhibition. “With modern developments in Black non secular research and the historical past of pictures, we noticed it essential to have interaction with Parks’ insightful perspective on how Black non secular and non secular traditions affect the surroundings and the communities from which they emerge.”
The exhibition is made up of over 40 objects, together with photographs and archival paperwork, and works from the Gordon Parks Legacy Assortment acquired by Howard College in 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by the brand new e-book Pastor E. F. Ledbetter and the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, 1953 revealed by Steidl, The Gordon Parks Basis, and Howard College. The e-book seems to be at a narrative that Parks undertook in Chicago in 1953 for LIFE journal, taking a look at a neighborhood Church and neighborhood. Whereas it will have been the primary project the place Parks labored as each photographer and author, it was by no means revealed.
The exhibition at Howard goes additional, exploring Parks’ work from the Nineteen Forties by the Eighties, and going past simply the Christian custom. In doing so, it explores the connection between faith and its position in supporting Black life and the Black neighborhood in historic methods as properly.
“Particularly, the photographs from Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church and the photographs of the Nation of Islam (included within the exhibition) exemplify the custom of the Black church or Black non secular neighborhood serving the bodily and social wants of the Black neighborhood,” Curator Dr. Melanee Harvey wrote to me, answering questions I emailed her. “You possibly can see the deep affect of the Social Gospel Motion of the Twenties to the Nineteen Forties that was pushed by the dedication to assembly the fundamental wants of meals, clothes, and social companies for his or her church members. In some ways, this was a sensible response to the affect of the Nice Despair. This additionally extends again to the long-held custom of African American benevolent societies of the late 18th century and early nineteenth century that financially supported people and households during times of illness and even financing the ultimate rituals of loss of life.”
However the work will not be static. Parks famously stated that he used his digicam as a weapon in opposition to poverty, racism, and social wrongs. In these sophisticated social, political, and spiritual occasions, the exhibition exhibits how Parks’ mantra can be utilized as a instructing instrument for the present occasions. For the scholars at Howard, whose work makes up a supplemental exhibition that showcases the scholars’ response to Parks’ legacy, this connection is one which they’re taught outright. Nevertheless, it is a vital lesson to show to anybody who works in opposition to injustice and violence, whether or not they’re college students or not.
“One of many greatest takeaway factors we make to college students at Howard is like Gordon Parks, they too have the criticality and accessible instruments of cell telephones with cameras to doc the world and our communities. We persistently empower our college students to actively doc the historical past unfolding earlier than our eyes. That is necessary as we practice college students at Howard to domesticate a priority for humanity at massive, and to actively have interaction in illuminating and confronting inequality or injustice with the instruments of their tutorial self-discipline and accessible instruments like cameras/digicam telephones,” Dr. Harvey explains. “As we more and more train the historic context and defining points of the Black Lives Matter Motion, you may’t train that interval with out discussing the company of African People who recorded injustice and antiblack violence. With this exhibition, we are able to make the connection that Gordon Parks is a precedent for the activist use of the digicam that we later see within the Black Lives Matter actions of the twenty-first century.”
That is maybe the best facet of Parks’ work and is likely one of the main causes that I all the time return to it. What he did will not be confined to the time during which he lived and labored. Quite, the lesson he taught me, and plenty of others, is that pictures may be tailored and used anytime one encounters injustice on this planet round. A church is not only about Christian traditions, neither is a mosque nearly Islam. These establishments would be the topics within the pictures, however there may be extra to it than simply that. What Parks was capturing on his rolls of movie was a lot deeper.
“Though that is an exhibition about faith and spirituality, that is additionally an exhibition (and the e-book) that focuses on neighborhood and company,” Harvey tells me. “Black non secular areas have been usually havens of security for African American communities. So with this exhibition, Gordon Parks information the establishments, particular person non secular practices, and human connections which have sustained Black Life in the US.”
Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Spiritual Life on view at Howard College’s is on view within the Dorothy Porter Room of Founders Library at Howard College by December 1, 2025.
Pastor E. F. Ledbetter and the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, 1953, may be bought by Steidl’s web site at steidl.de.
