During the 1940s American photographer Gordon Parks (1912-2006) grew from a self-taught photographer making portraits and documenting everyday life in Saint Paul and Chicago to a visionary professional shooting for Ebony, Vogue, Fortune, and Life. For the first time, the formative decades of Parks’s 60-year career are the focus of an exhibition, which brings together 120 photographs and ephemera—including magazines, books, letters, and family pictures. The exhibition will illustrate how Parks’s early experiences at the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, and Standard Oil (New Jersey) as well as his close relationships with Roy Stryker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, helped shape his groundbreaking style. A fully illustrated catalog, with extensive new research and previously unpublished images, will accompany the exhibition.
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