Public Employee Press

Photo Exhibit
Gordon Parks: His camera fought racism and poverty

The College of New Rochelle will feature its collection of prints by the renowned self-taught African American photographer Gordon Parks and his daughter Toni Parks in its Castle Gallery from Dec. 7, 2010, to Feb. 20, 2011.

The first African American photographer at Life magazine (1948) and the first to write, score and direct a Hollywood film ("Shaft," 1971), Parks also co founded Essence magazine. His photos documenting the civil rights movement and his portraits of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Barbra Streisand are well known, and he also won international acclaim as a poet, novelist and composer.

Toni Parks is an active photographer and member of Kamoinge, a New York-based group of African-American photographers. The show includes black and-white and color prints by father and daughter that collectively span more than 50 years of work.

After facing poverty and prejudice in his own life, Parks learned that, as he said, "the camera could be a weapon." He believed, too, in the power of the words that accompany photographs.

Parks said his job as a photographer was to "expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, by showing the people who suffered most under it."

His best-known image, which is in the exhibit, shows Ella Watson, a victim and survivor of the exploitation and discrimination he found in the nation's capital when he went to work for the Farm Security Admin. in 1942.

The Black housekeeping worker, whose father had been killed by a lynch mob, stands with her tools in front of an American flag in a government building. Parks took "American Gothic Washington, D.C." in anger on a day when a clothing store, a movie and a restaurant had refused his business because of his skin color.

Parks, who died in 2006 at 93, said the theme of all his work was freedom.

The Castle Gallery is on CNR's Main Campus at 29 Castle Place, New Rochelle, NY. Gallery hours are Monday - Thursday, 9 a.m. - 9 p.m., and Friday - Sunday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

For additional information, tours, and directions, call 914-654-5423 or go to www.cnr.edu/cg.htm

If you go, PEP would appreciate a letter expressing your feelings about the exhibit.

— Bill Schleicher