Gordon Parks courageous photography helped awaken America at the dawn of the civil rights era. He was a master of portraying people from every walk of life. But for years some of Parks’ most important early work seemed lost.
In 1950, Gordon Parks was the only African-American photographer working for Life magazine, a rising star who was gaining the power to call his own shots, and he proposed a cover story both highly political and deeply personal: to return to Fort Scott, Kan., the prairie town where he had grown up, to find his 11 classmates in a segregated middle school.
At first glance, many of these photographs of Alabama in 1956 suggest the mellow, nostalgic visions of traditional American life that we associate with Norman Rockwell’s illustrations or Ronald Reagan’s speeches.
Not to be outdone, Arthur Roger Gallery will mark the occasion with three shows opening in its adjacent gallery spaces on Julia Street. Painter Francis X. Pavy explores issues concerning the Louisiana wetlands in a series of new works on view in the gallery’s main space at 432 Julia, while a suite of never-before-seen photographs from a 1956 Life magazine photo essay assignment by Gordon Parks (who was also the subject of a major exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art last year) will be shown next door at 434 Julia. An interactive digital video piece by New Orleans artist Robert Hannant in the gallery’s video room will round out the offerings.