| For over 60 years, African-American photographer Gordon Parks traveled around the world with a camera in hand and a purpose in mind. He documented both the anonymous and the celebrity, capturing faces everywhere. His latest exhibition at the Gallery at Hermès witnesses the life and works of this adopted New Yorker. In 1951, in Paris, Gordon Parks met Alberto Giacometti. The iconic artist is photographed from behind, at the heart of his workshop. Around him dance his ghostly figures of steel. The image is dark, almost deaf. The sculptor takes a furtive eye to the lens. Rigorous composition emphasizes intimacy. In the foreground, a threatening skeletal arm emerges. The artist, the hand, and the work are brilliantly joined together by the photographer. A year later, in New York, Parks photographed Alexander Calder preparing his mobile installation. |  |
Vincent Thierry
For over 60 years, African-American photographer Gordon Parks traveled around the world with a camera in hand and a purpose in mind. He documented both the anonymous and the celebrity, capturing faces everywhere. His latest exhibition at the Gallery at Hermès witnesses the life and works of this adopted New Yorker.
In 1951, in Paris, Gordon Parks met Alberto Giacometti. The iconic artist is photographed from behind, at the heart of his workshop. Around him dance his ghostly figures of steel. The image is dark, almost deaf. The sculptor takes a furtive eye to the lens. Rigorous composition emphasizes intimacy. In the foreground, a threatening skeletal arm emerges. The artist, the hand, and the work are brilliantly joined together by the photographer. A year later, in New York, Parks photographed Alexander Calder preparing his mobile installation. White spots on a black background: the enigmatic sculptures punctuate the image, seeming to escape from the hands of the artist at work. These two photos published in Life Magazine match in several ways. They illustrate the vision of Gordon Parks, his quest for composition, and his skill at altering light. The power speaks through the simplicity of emotions he shows. The images of individuals illustrate the strength of his subjects. The strength of an art, seemingly silent, is at the heart of the Portraits by Gordon Parks exhibition. The photographs exhibited are the work of a man who, throughout his career, used his camera to detect and reveal injustices as well as beauty and exceptional humans beings.
Gordon Parks was born in 1912, in Kansas. After a poor childhood, the young man traveled from job to job throughout many places around the United States. All the while, he had a camera with him. In 1942, he joined the Farm Security Administration, and became its first African-American employee.
Struck by the injustice and the oppression of Segregation, Parks wanted to express his anger, and decided to commit himself to the battle in justice. It is by the power of his images that he did. His famous photographs documenting the Civil Rights Movement were in many 1960s publications.
A self made man, Gordon Parks became a renowned photographer, and worked with some of the most prestigious publications. The first African-American photographer at Vogue and Life Magazine, he continued to express his feeling for the African-American cause, while also diversifying his subjects. He multiplied his portraits of celebrities without ever forgetting the anonymous.
It is this committed artist and activist that Portraits by Gordon Parks honors. With more than 50 black-and-white images, the exhibition presents the photographer’s entire body of work. It plays on the dichotomy of his work and juxtaposes the faces, achieving a mural of the history of 20th-century America. When viewers face these peaceful and quite images, they understand, just as Gordon Parks did, that they are in front of a simple gallery of intimate moments that plunge us into the past and the future of our country.
