CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/22/2019

The work of Gordon Parks is, in fact, a celebration of Black History

Featured image, “Charles White in front of his mural, ‘Chaos of the American Negro’” (1941), is reproduced from Gordon Parks: The New Tide, a collection of more than 150 early works by the irrepressible African-American photographer, filmmaker and composer. Other portraits include Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Marian Anderson and Eleanor Roosevelt, in addition to a variety of American workers, society figures, fashion models and anonymous poor. This remarkable volume includes a wealth of archival materials, including letters, fellowship applications, magazine work, historical photographs from Parks’s early life and scholarly essays by such esteemed contributors as Philip Brookman, Sarah Lewis, Richard J. Powell, Deborah Willis and Maurice Berger, who quotes Parks: “I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America—poverty, racism, discrimination.”