Reframed: Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family

Gordon Parks’s 1967 series of images for Life magazine documenting the day-to-day of the Fontenelle family put forth a more intimate and tender view of his subjects than was typical for Parks’s commissioned documentary photography at the time. When faced with the task of celebrating the centennial of Parks’s birth in 2012, it was this body of work that the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Gordon Parks Foundation championed with a monographic exhibition. Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family, curated by Thelma Golden, presented approximately thirty prints from the series, some of which had never been shown publicly.

In 1967 the editors of Life asked their in-house photographers to reflect on how the publication could tackle growing concerns of violence in America’s north-eastern urban centers. The question came after a long summer of national and international upheaval, from civil rights movement demonstrations to escalations in foreign wars. After being hired as the first African American staff photographer for Life in 1948, Parks’s assignments often sent him around the nation and abroad to document such historical and political events. However, this 1967 assignment encouraged Parks to bring his focus to a community for which he had personal ties, as he was reminded of his own time as a resident in Harlem.

Like most African Americans in the early twentieth century, Parks left his Southern hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, and headed north in his young adult years in search of better job opportunities. Although Parks had eventually found success as a photographer, he now had to find a way of documenting a cycle of poverty that many other African American migrants were not as fortunate to escape. For Life, Parks decided to photo-graph the Fontenelles, a Black family living in Harlem. When Parks went to photograph the Fontenelles, the father, Norman, mother, Bessie, and eight of their children lived together in a tenement building on Eighth Avenue. In the photographs that were later published in the March 8, 1968 issue, all of which were exhibited at the Museum in 2012, Parks’s camera follows the family as they struggle to combat the cold weather of the impending winter. In one image, Bessie and her children huddle around the gas oven to keep warm, while in another the two youngest children, Ellen and Richard, are portrayed sharing a glass of milk. Each image documents universal scenes of everyday life that are burdened with the hardships of impoverishment.

Life readers were confronted with the juxtaposition between their privilege and the Fontenelles’s disadvantage. Parks stressed the harshness of this disparity in his accompanying essay: “For I am you, staring back from a mirror of poverty and despair, of revolt and freedom. Look at me and know that to destroy me is to destroy yourself.1” Life’s feature on the Fontenelles caused an unexpectedly positive response. Many readers expressed concern for the family’s living conditions, and wrote back to the publication asking how they could offer support. Eventually, the family received enough donations from readers to buy a new home on Long Island.2

Parks’s photographs assert that the power of photography lies in its ability to encourage empathy among its viewers, having successfully inspired support from readers who saw themselves and their loved ones in images of Norman, Bessie, and their children. In our contemporary political context, it is useful to reflect on the influence of this body of work, particularly when divisiveness and apathy appear to be more abundant than mutual understanding. This year, the Gordon Parks Foundation will be reprinting the exhibition catalogue for Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family, not only to celebrate Parks’s centennial, but also to remind us of the power of photography to foster solidarity, community, and care.