Gordon Parks: Segregation Story
Steidl presents Segregation Story a new title featuring images from Gordon Parks’ powerful 1956 photographic series. The 1956 series Restraints: Open and Hidden, captured the life of an extended African-American family living in America’s racially segregated South. Many of the photographs featured in the title have not been published before.
Parks’ photographic series led to the development of hundreds of transparencies. As such it formed one of the photographer’s earliest social documentary studies on colour film.
Parks himself was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. As an itinerant labourer he worked, among other jobs, as a brothel pianist and railcar porter before he bought a camera at a pawnshop and trained himself in the art of photography. The following years saw Parks develop as a photographer. Aside form his work with the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information (1941–1945) and Life Magazine (1948–1972), Parks also found success as a film director author and composer. The first African-American director to helm a major motion picture, he popularised the Blaxploitation genre through his film Shaft (1971).
Parks wrote numerous memoirs, novels and books of poetry, and received many awards, including the National Medal of Arts, and more than 50 honorary degrees. In 1997 the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, mounted his retrospective exhibition Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks.
Segregation Story is published in conjunction with an exhibition by the same name at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, US. Displaying 40 colour photographs from the series, the exhibition will be on display until Sunday 21 June 2015.
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