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FEATURED SCHOLAR: John Edwin Mason

Gordon Parks and American Democracy

Saturday, October 19 - 2:45PM to 3:45PM
Graduate Hotel, Sixty Room, 3rd floor

Mason's talk looks at "A Harlem Family," a Gordon Parks photo-essay which appeared in Life magazine in March 1968. During the 1950s and 1960s, Parks created a new form of visual journalism in which he married highly subjective texts to photographs that relied on the well-established rhetoric of documentary "objectivity." The photo-essays won him widespread acclaim and established him as one of the leading photographers of his generation. Yet their innovative mix of overtly subjective words and seeming objective images has been overlooked. Parks' innovations were most clearly seen in "A Harlem Family." Its text opened with a poem. In it he addressed his readers as "You" and challenged them to see themselves in him and, by extension, in the impoverished black family at the center of the photo-essay. The body of the text, written in first-person prose, reinforced this subjectivity. His photographs, on the other hand, derived their strength from their embrace conventions of documentary "truth." Shot in black and white, with subjects who seem unaware of the photographer's presence, the images style themselves as transparent windows on the world. The combination of subjectivity and rhetorical objectivity was powerful. Hundreds of readers wrote to the Parks and the magazine, many sending small cash donations for the family. Parks had touched their hearts, and they responded with charity. This very success, however, pointed to a larger failure. The photo-essay did little to help readers understand the ways in which segregation and systemic racism shaped the destinies of this family and so many others.

speaker

John Edwin  Mason
John Edwin Mason

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