‘The camera is my weapon of choice’: Gordon Parks' shots of segregation

In the summer of 1956 Life sent Gordon Parks, its first Black staff photographer, to Alabama to document racial segregation after the Montgomery bus boycott. Parks, then in his early 40s, returned with intimate, vivid colour photographs that captured the daily indignities of the Jim Crow South.

Those images form the backbone of a new survey opening at the Alison Jacques gallery in London, curated by Bryan Stevenson, who selected work from 1942 to 1967 — the photographer’s most active years. Parks followed an extended family, the Thorntons, in Mobile, shooting scenes at water fountains, department stores and restaurants governed by “separate but equal.” The use of colour — bright contrasts and soft pastels — lifts the narrative beyond the black-and-white news imagery most Americans had seen, animating harms that might otherwise feel two-dimensional, Stevenson says.

Other works in the show range from Parks’s Harlem projects and portraits of Malcolm X to pictures of jails and the March on Washington.

United Kingdom, London

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