CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/15/2024

Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with a photograph from 'Gordon Parks: Segregation Story'

Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama (1956) is reproduced from Gordon Parks: Segregation Story—one of the great photography books of the twentieth century and perhaps Parks’ photographic masterpiece—recently expanded to include 30 previously unpublished photographs and a new essay by artist Dawoud Bey, among other special features. “In picture after picture,” Bey writes, we see that “deliberate choices of tool, material and sensibility lend the Black Southern presence, often under siege, a sense of lives fully and expressively lived. We see Black subjects and spaces that are rendered with all of the qualities of expressivity that the medium is capable of in the hands of one seeking to use it as not only an information-gathering tool, and as a ‘weapon against all the things I dislike about America,’ as Parks once stated, but also as a transformative tool capable of reshaping the experience of the world, and the Southern Black peoples who lived in it, into photographs that are the equal of those made by others whose works are considered formative to the medium’s expressive potential.”