Overview

In 1953, Gordon Parks returned to Chicago on assignment for Life magazine to photograph the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church for a series on American religious life. After the success of his recent work for Life, Parks approached the Near West Side church with a decisive eye toward composing compelling images that conveyed simultaneously the universal humanity and local specificity of the religious community. This would be the first assignment for which he was both writer as well as photographer. His photographs and essay were never published by Life, yet as this book demonstrates, Parks' visual and textual representation of Black religious life powerfully documents the dynamism of a community shaped by the Great Migration and Chicago's industrial landscape. Parks embarked on a significant chapter of his aesthetic and conceptual development through his engagement with the pastor, the Reverend Ernest F. Ledbetter, Sr., and the members of his church. This publication features more than 65 previously unpublished photographs and contact sheets, complemented by Parks' unseen manuscript and ephemeral material from the private collection of the Ledbetter family. A range of scholarly essays provides further insight and contextual analysis in art history, cultural geography, Black religious studies, and creative writing. Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation and Howard University, Washington DC

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9783969994733

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Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was one of the twentieth century's preeminent American photographers. From the 1940s through the dawn of the twenty-first century, he created work that focused on social justice, race relations, the civil rights movement, and the African American experience. Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks won a Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship in 1942 and went on to do groundbreaking work for the Farm Security Administration and magazines such as Ebony, Vogue, and Life, where he was a staff photographer for more than two decades. Beyond his work in photography, Parks was a respected film director, composer, memoirist, novelist and poet, who left behind an exceptional body of work that is a powerful record and interpretation of American life and culture.

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