In the Exhibition “Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole,” Moving Scenes of Public and Private Black Life
America has never really been good at remembering—especially when it comes to the conditions of its Black citizens. As a result, the nation’s attitude toward Black people has often been cyclical: death, promises, death, promises, death. Take this summer: George Floyd died at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis. Black Americans and their allies demanded equity and justice. White Americans promised to say less and listen more. Then, the seasons changed and so too, it seemed, did the memories of those pledges. Winter settled in.
What to do in the face of a nation that refuses to remember? “Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole,” a new exhibition of the celebrated Black photographer’s work at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, attempts to answer this question carefully and urgently. The two-part show, which was curated in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation, brings together a range of Gordon Parks’s photography from 1942 to 1970 to wrestle with the tension between public imagination and private realities, and challenge viewers to witness and reflect on the details of Black life in America. It also offers a moment to revisit and meditate on the work of one of the most talented photographers in American history, whose commitment to telling stories could be felt in everything from his photo essays for Life, where he was the first Black staff photographer, to his commissions for fashion magazines like Vogue.
“Half and the Whole” opens with a short essay by New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb, wherein he connects Parks to George Floyd through their respective migrations to Minnesota. Parks moved to St. Paul from Kansas in 1928 after the death of his mother. Floyd moved to Minneapolis a few years before his own death. They were both searching: Parks’s exploration led him to pick up a camera at 25 and capture what he saw around him; Floyd’s was cut tragically short. Cobb goes on to meditate on the concept of “the Void”—that space between how the country sees and treats its Black citizens and how those same folk see themselves. “There is nothing in Parks’s body of work that includes the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter,’ but it didn’t need to. He’d already shown that they do, minute after minute, across the void from his time to our own,” Cobb writes.
The photographs on display at the gallery’s 24th Street location pick up where Cobb’s essay ends. Images of individual and collective Black protest are on full display. There are the photos taken after a 1962 police raid on a Nation of Islam mosque in Los Angeles, where protesters hold signs that resonated with activism in 2020: “We are living in a Police State,” reads one, “Liberty or Death,” reads another. Included in this collection are dynamic portraits of Malcolm X, with whom Parks developed a friendship while on a weeks-long assignment for Life, and one of Parks’s most famous images—that of Ella Watson, a cleaning woman at the Farm Security Administration office in Washington, D.C.
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If protest defined the photographs on 24th Street, then relationships define the ones at Jack Shainman’s 20th Street space. This part of the exhibition moves away from the obvious moral imperative of Parks’s photography and saunters into something more subtle and intimate. Although the reality of public life still looms in these images—Jim Crow signs denoting where Black people can and cannot congregate, for example—the focus is really between family, between friends, between community members. Like the photographs on 24th Street, these images do not come from a single source—they are plucked and pulled from Parks’s many projects and endeavors, including his creative partnership with writer Ralph Ellison and his semi-autobiographical novel and later film The Learning Tree.
