CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/17/2020

'Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime' is back in stock!

"Crime Suspect with Gun, Chicago, Illinois" (1957) is reproduced from Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, back in stock at last. "In this short series for Life, shot over six weeks and consisting of a few dozen images, Parks deftly captured the processes of criminalization, policing, arrest, and imprisonment," Nicole Fleetwood writes. "His photos allowed readers in the 1950s (and permit contemporary audiences) to see the steps along these processes—complete with officers on their beat looking for suspicious activity, the shakedown of criminal suspects, the administrative procedures of arrest and fingerprinting, and finally the bars and walls of prison, in this case San Quentin in California… Parks’s photographs foreshadow what will unfold in the coming decades, as civil rights activists and social movements make greater demands for equal rights, access, and justice, and as policing grows more aggressive and prisons more punitive. Seeing these images, we might ask what lessons we can learn from The Atmosphere of Crime to address the massive and brutal prison system we have inherited."