Damaso
Photojournalist
An exhibition of photographs by Gordon Parks at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, revisits a highly personal, yet never-published photo essay he developed for LIFE magazine in 1950. In 1948, LIFE assigned Parks, the magazine’s first African-American photographer to be hired full time, to do a story about segregation in American education. Parks centered on what happened to his former friends and classmates at the all-black grade school in Kansas he had attended. The results were intimate portraits of African-American families that had set out to cities across the Midwest—Chicago, Detroit, and Columbus, Ohio—as well as scenes of small-town life from where Parks grew up nearly twenty years prior. (The story, however, never ran, for reasons still unknown.) The premise lends the exhibition, which opens this Saturday, its title: “Back to Fort Scott.”
http://www.aperture.org/blog/gordon-parks-back-fort-scott-opens-mfa-boston/
http://www.aperture.org/blog/gordon-parks-back-fort-scott-opens-mfa-boston/
Kwesi
Well-known
just saw it on Saturday.
I highly recommend this to anyone within driving distance. This is a brilliant, emotionally taught and intellectual tour de force of a show! One leaves the show wondering why Life never ran the story. Perhaps it would have shattered too many stereotypes of the African American experience for Life's target audience. Perhaps too radical a step for the 50's
I highly recommend this to anyone within driving distance. This is a brilliant, emotionally taught and intellectual tour de force of a show! One leaves the show wondering why Life never ran the story. Perhaps it would have shattered too many stereotypes of the African American experience for Life's target audience. Perhaps too radical a step for the 50's