E12 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022
were exhausted by a social safety
net that offered little security.
Parks captured the Fontenelle
children’s ambitions, the father’s
proud but frustrated manhood,
the mother’s hope. Like Parks
with the Fontenelles, Frazier built
a relationship with Flint resi-
dents, spending long expanses of
time with them before she began
to document their day-to-day
lives.
“When you look at that image
of Zion doing her homework, I’m
speaking to Gordon. This is me
speaking directly to Gordon
Parks,” Frazier tells me. “I’m mak-
ing that cross-generational, vis-
ual nod to him. But it’s also uplift-
ing Zion. There’s a little girl in
that same photo essay on the
Fontenelle family. Yes, they live in
a dilapidated home. Yes, they
don’t have lights and gas. Yes,
there are mice. Yes, they don’t
have food. But what do you see
those children doing? Studying
their books.” The photographs
were taken almost 50 years apart,
and yet they tell the same story —
that of Black children striving
despite everything weighted
against them.
Another heir to Parks’s legacy
is Tyler Mitchell, who at 23 years
old was thrust into the interna-
tional spotlight when he shot
Beyoncé for Vogue magazine in
2018, thus becoming the first
Black photographer to have his
work featured on the glossy’s cov-
er in its then-126-year history.
Soon after, he photographed Vice
President Harris for the cover in
his signature soft-focus familiari-
ty. Mitchell was a 2021 recipient
of a foundation fellowship, and
his exhibition reopened the gal-
lery this past fall after its pan-
demic closure. The most recent
fellowship recipients, photogra-
pher Andre D. Wagner and Bisa
Butler, a textile artist who has
reimagined the quilting tradi-
tion, will install shows later this
year. Other artistic scions include
Devin Allen, Deana Lawson, Dar-
io Calmese, Derrick Adams and,
perhaps Parks’s closest creative
kin, Jamel Shabazz.
“It’s impossible as an artist not
to be influenced by his work,” says
fashion designer Dao-Yi Chow. He
and business partner Maxwell Os-
borne created a collection of Pub-
lic School NYC shirts featuring
Parks’s photography. “His images
speak to multiple generations.
The power of his work is not just
his access. It was that he never sat
in judgment of what he was cover-
ing.”ON BLACK BEAUTY
Parks’s photography gave voice
to people who looked like him. He
patiently immersed himself in the
communities he was document-
ing, showcasing their unremark-
able humanity. Even today, such a
patient form of expression is a
highly politicized act. “Gordon
uses the term ‘love’ in his work.
Tyler does the same in seeing a
love story” with his subjects, says
Deborah Willis, chair of New York
University’s photography depart-
ment and Mitchell’s former pro-
fessor.
When she saw Mitchell’s pho-
tographs of Beyoncé, Willis im-
mediately focused on the ivory
fabric floating behind the per-
former, who is in the foreground,
in one image wearing a crown of
flowers and a flowing white dress
that recalls “Daughters of the
Dust,” in another with her hair in
thick braids and dressed in the
colors of the Pan-African flag.
“What I love about that work is
the clothesline, the shadows on
the sheets. I was so excited about
the way he reimagined women at
work. All that sense of labor, love
about our clothes, connecting
across the clothes line. I also
connected it to art history,” says
Willis, who is also a photographer
and curator. “I saw these critical
moments of art history and our
history in this singular image.”
Willis also saw the influence of
Parks. In a picture of the Fon-
tenelle family’s home, Parks high-
lights a little girl’s dress hanging,
neatly ironed amid the chaos,
waiting to be slipped on: “You see
the awful things around them,
but you’re also seeing the little
girl’s dress. It was her armor — an
ironed dress — and her sense of
pride. He could see that.”
The ability of a single portrait
to capture beauty, history, prog-
ress and the power of self-defini-
tion was one of Parks’s great
strengths as an artist. He accom-
plished this in one of his most
famous images, that of a woman
in a pale blue dress standing with
a little girl in a pristine white
frock with matching anklets. The
visual story is about proud and
intentional femininity. The wom-
an and child stand together on a
quiet street, their idyllic wonder
is in defiance of the red neon sign
above them that screams: Col-
ored Entrance. Parks upended
stereotypes and told new stories
about beauty.
What kind of story could Dario
Calmese tell in the portrait Vanity
Fair commissioned him to maketown that also had to contend
with lead contamination. “When
I arrived in Flint and I saw that it
was the same kind of environ-
mental racism, it lit a fire under
me to make the most beautiful,
humane, dignified, empowering
images of her so she will know ...
that she is a victor, not a victim,”
Frazier says.
Her pictures echo those from
Parks’s 1968 Life magazine story
on Harlem’s Fontenelles, another
family that struggled mightily to
live with dignity even as theythick, clothbound volume of im-
ages accompanies the current ex-
hibition. In one of the pictures,
Zion is at home hunched over her
books. She’s using a bed as a desk,
and her papers are spread out
before her as she completes her
homework. Atop the bedside ta-
ble are two bottles of water —
reminders of the odds she faces,
stubborn truths about the unfair-
ness of America’s economic sys-
tem.
Frazier grew up in the 1980s in
Braddock, Penn., an old steel millways. Because fortunately, Black
is still beautiful. Unfortunately,
we’re still getting treated the way
we’re getting treated by the po-
lice,” Dean says in an interview
before the gala. Parks’s work is
“almost like a photographic Bible
... something that people look at
to go off and have belief in and get
guidance from.”
Frazier, who photographed the
family in Flint, is the first recipi-
ent of a prize bestowed by the
foundation in collaboration with
German publisher Steidl and athat only seems to get wider. The
2022 honorees are artist Mark
Bradford, Ford Foundation Presi-
dent Darren Walker, philanthro-
pist Laurene Powell Jobs, as well
as Tonya Lewis Lee and Spike Lee.
Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and
Alicia Keys, who have emerged as
preeminent collectors of Parks’s
photography, co-chaired the eve-
ning dedicated to art and social
justice.
“It’s a proven fact that we’re
going in a circle in some fortunate
ways and in some unfortunatecy. Located in Westchester Coun-
ty, the foundation is more than an
hour away from Manhattan’s art-
dense Chelsea neighborhood and
miles away from the rich history
of Harlem, where Parks, a world-
class, barrier-breaking photogra-
pher, created some of his most
influential work. Nonetheless, his
legacy is centered here, in this
modest business district of two-
and three-story buildings and
lush flowering trees. From this
space, his influence extends wide.
Parks died in 2006 at 93, but
his artistic impact is as potent as
ever. He was a Black man docu-
menting the highs and lows of his
people, as well as the broader
world. His legacy is expansive,
arguably more than any other
Black photographer’s. He moved
through life wearing cowboy hats,
leather bombers and ascots,
breaking racial barriers, opening
doors for others. His work ex-
plored issues of inequality and
poverty that still haunt us,
launching conversations that
continue in art, politics and activ-
ism. And most important in 2022,
Parks and his foundation help
subsequent generations of Black
artists see themselves, their com-
munities and their possibilities
more clearly. Examining their art,
and looking at the ways in which
it relates to the work Parks was
doing more than 50 years ago,
helps us to better understand the
impact of history, human nature
and systemic racism on our lives
today. It also reminds us to pay
attention to the simple joys of
everyday life.
At a time when the country is
spinning in circles trying to make
sense of race, ward off inhumani-
ty and define social justice,
Parks’s artistic heirs are uniquely
positioned to shed light, offer
guidance and question the status
quo. They’re doing so with heart-
ening audacity and blessed ur-
gency.
“It’s not that I see so much of
him in one artist. I see some of
him in a lot of artists. I feel
Gordon is ubiquitous,” says writer
Jelani Cobb, one of the executive
producers of a recent documen-
tary on Parks and incoming dean
of Columbia Journalism School.
“He’s one of those people who
may not have the answer, but he
helps you understand the right
question.”
ON BLACK DIGNITY
Parks was a photographer,
filmmaker and writer who chron-
icled the lives of Black men, wom-
en and children in their finest
hour, on their worst days and,
perhaps most important, during
their most quotidian moments.
He photographed fashion for Eb-
ony and Vogue magazine and shot
celebrities, gang members and
the impoverished for Life. His
images of cleaning woman Ella
Watson, the unemployed, the al-
most-forgotten members of our
society, hang on the walls of mu-
seums and in the homes of privi-
leged collectors.
The foundation is the reposito-
ry for his negatives, contact
sheets and notes, which are
stored floor-to-ceiling in a tem-
perature-controlled vault. The
foundation’s library houses myri-
ad exhibition catalogues and
books celebrating his work, as
well as a bound collection of Life’s
archives. The walls are adorned
with magnificent examples of
Parks’s photography, including
images from his series on segre-
gation in the South and from “A
Man Becomes Invisible,” his col-
laboration with writer Ralph Elli-
son. There are also photographs
by those Parks influenced. The
foundation is not a cemetery; it’s
an incubator.
Parks is well-known for the
1969 semi-autobiographical film,
“The Learning Tree,” which he
wrote and directed, and for his
direction of “Shaft,” which in 1971
helped launch a new Black film
vernacular. But his photography
is at the heart of his catholic
creativity. And it seems as though
there’s always a celebration of
that work ... somewhere, in some
form. In 2017, the video for Kend-
rick Lamar’s song “Element” re-
created several of Parks’s photo-
graphs. In 2021, his photography
was the subject of the HBO docu-
mentary “A Choice of Weapons:
Inspired by Gordon Parks.” An
exhibition featuring his Pitts-
burgh photographs opened in
April at the city’s Carnegie Mu-
seum of Art. Indeed, his name was
called out in an installment of
“And Just Like That” — the 2021
revival of “Sex and the City” — as a
two-word seal of approval of a
character’s taste in Black artists.
Just recently, Howard Univer-
sity acquired a trove of Parks’s
earliest photographs as a source
of inspiration and scholarly re-
search. And in May, after two
pandemic gap years, the founda-
tion’s annual gala once again
highlighted men and women who
further communication across
the cultural divide, a yawning gap
GORDON PARKS FROM E1
ArtDERRICK ADAMS/DERRICK ADAMS STUDIOLATOYA RUBY FRAZIER/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY JAMEL SHABAZZDERRICK ADAMS/DERRICK ADAMS STUDIO DARIO CALMESE/NUMÉRO BERLINFurthering communicationacross the cultural divideCLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Derrick Adams’s “Family Portrait 6,” 2019; Jamel Shabazz’s “Black and White in America,”
Brooklyn, 2010; Dario Calmese’s 2019 cover for Numéro Berlin; Adams’s “Floater 106,” 2020; and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Zion,
Her Mother Shea, and Her Grandfather Mr. Smiley Riding on Their Tennessee Walking Horses, Mares, P.T. (P.T.’s Miss One Of A
Kind), Dolly (Secretly), and Blue (Blue’s Royal Threat),” Newton, Miss., 2017/2019, printed 2021.