ARTS . Arts Picks

Gordon Parks

"Bare Witness," Sat., Oct. 11-Jan. 4, $10 admission (free on Sundays), Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, Del., 302-571-9590, delart.org.


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Published: Oct 7, 2008

photography

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Film lovers know Gordon Parks as the director of Shaft. However, that was nearly three decades after Parks started a phenomenally diverse career that was as far from blaxploitation as possible. Parks was a writer, a filmmaker and, most prolifically, a photographer. "He used to say that as an African-American man, he always felt he could be on the brink of poverty, that he needed to be ready to shift and do something else," says Heather Campbell Coyle, associate curator at Delaware Art Museum, which is hosting a retrospective of his work. "But also I think he had this restless intellect to explore new things." Parks did his best work documenting poverty and the civil rights movement, first for the Farm Security Administration, then for Life magazine. Parks captured the faces of children, elders and participants in a Black Muslim rally. One of Coyle's favorites is Emerging Man, shot in collaboration with friend Ralph Ellison. When Life published an essay related to Ellison's novel Invisible Man, Parks took images of a figure rising out of a manhole on a street to illustrate it. "The book is powerful and sad, but the photograph seems more positive, perhaps because of the title, which identifies the man as 'emerging,'" says Coyle. "It's a beautiful photograph, and it combines his urban documentary sensibility with something more poetic." Parks died in 2006, but not before he handpicked this selection of images — which include the classic satire American Gothic (pictured), as well as images of Muhammad Ali and Ingrid Bergman — as examples of his best work.

"Bare Witness," Sat., Oct. 11-Jan. 4, $10 admission (free on Sundays), Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, Del., 302-571-9590, delart.org.