By Aramide Tinubu ·Updated November 12, 2021
By the time Gordon Parks shot his first photograph for Life Magazine, his mother had died, racism had forced him out of his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, and he’d worked in brothels, as a singer, and as a professional basketball player. He was not yet 30 when he captured the infamous image titled “American Gothic” and the follow-up sequence of photos of Ella Watson. Watson worked as a cleaner in the Farm Security Administration building where Parks had a fellowship. HBO’s documentary, A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, doesn’t simply examine the photographer’s extensive body of work. It also explores his activism and what it meant to preserve the 20th-century Germany that I started to understand better who Gordon Parks was. Not through his photographs, but through a book that his son David did on his experience in Vietnam called GI Diary.”
Parks’ images are one thing, but Allen has used the photographer/filmmaker’s career to blueprint his own work. “It wasn’t so much the imagery, it was him as a person and how he was able to navigate so many spaces,” the photographer explained. “Baltimore was a pretty segregated city, so I didn’t start interacting outside my community and start meeting white people and people outside of the Black artists should be forced to wear that label. “I was born into an environmentally hazardous steel mill town in the 1980s,” she explained. “[I] was raised by my Grandma Ruby who supported and encouraged me to be an artist. It led me to the revelation that If I was going to survive then art and education was the answer. My camera is my compass and my guide.”
In contrast to Allen and Fraizer, much of Shabazz’s work consists of images of the past. They are stunning reflections of Black and brown people from the ’80s and ’90s. “What has happened since
The post LaToya Ruby Frazier, Devin Allen And Jamel Shabazz On Gordon Parks’ Legacy And Black Photography Today appeared first on Essence.
