Gordon Parks (1912-2006)
"Back to Fort Scott"
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
January 17, 2015 – September 13, 2015
Robert and Jane Burke Gallery (Gallery 335)
March 3, 2015
Gordon Parks may not have had a plan when the Life Magazine photographer was assigned to visit his hometown in Fort Scott, Kansas. The first stirrings of desegregation were roiling in the South, a low indistinct rumbling quietly unsettling a way of life largely undisturbed since the Civil War. Parks felt it underfoot. Was there evidence of hope for his classmates that racial oppression could or would be overcome?
The magazine’s first black photojournalist had been hired two years before. His colleagues? Names that adorn coffee table glossies… Margaret Bourke-White, Andreas Feininger, Alfred Eisenstat, Cecil Beaton, Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, to name a few. Like them, Parks had an eye for content and composition. It was his life experience that separated him most distinctly from his colleagues.
“Back To Fort Scott,” a potent little exhibition of meticulously printed black and white photographs, is like an artsy, retro speed bump between adjacent galleries featuring big, bold modern art, colorful and expansive. The forty two photographs hung on the walls of the modest Robert and Jane Burke Gallery on the third level, the images mostly 8 x 10 inches in size require close observation.
Parks assignment was to take the temperature of the effect of school segregation in the south. Born and raised in Fort Scott, Parks had his own history. He reconnected with ten of the twelve of his ninth grade classmates with whom he graduated from same all-black Plaza Elementary School in 1927 and hadn’t seen since.
The very first photo in the exhibit - a middle-aged white man in farmer overalls stands at a train crossing in the middle of town, a speculative look on his creased face as he surveys the photographer. The "STOP" sign held in his hand is a perfect metaphor for Fort Scott, Kansas and the South in the 1950s. The hard lines of segregation are as deeply embedded here as those steel railroad tracks running through the middle of town. Parks the photojournalist had to be aware of the significance of the sign and the subject of desegregation.
Slowly walk around the four walls of the small gallery. Without reading one word of the background notes that accompany each print, you discover what he decided to say as Parks presents the subjects of his photographs.
Parks was slyly political. He knew the power and stature of Life Magazine and that white readers had little person-to-person interaction action with their black counterparts. He intended to present them in a portrait of “negro” life never seen before in a popular national publication.
His photos of couples and families were taken with backgrounds of front doors, front porches or living rooms, all signs of middle class stature. It's safe to say that white Americans hadn't seen this treatment of black society before. As a matter of fact, if you substitute white for black skin color, you have a documentary scrapbook review of white middle class America in the heartland.
The take-away: We are in our own homes; we are husbands, wives, children, and elders; we have jobs; we enjoy leisure time; we are proud folks with middle class ideals; we dress well; we have aspirations; we are black.
As was the Life Magazine protocol, Parks took notes about their jobs and wages. Most of the photos are untitled but accompanied by information gathered by Parks.
This is 1950, mind you. Life Magazine was the first all photographic news magazine. It sold more than 13 million copies a week at one point in a 40-year span in which it dominated the market. The audience was middle class America…white America.
Parks met and photographed Louella Russell, the only classmate still living in Fort Scott, and her husband and teenage daughter. He roamed the town, shooting photos of friends (including a few white residents) and being reminded of the strict segregation of the day as he photographed a young black couple in standing under the marquee of a segregated movie theater and a baseball game at a local park. Parks recalls sitting in the “buzzard's roost” in the back upper reaches of the theater, the only place "negroes" were permitted to sit. His photo of a baseball game shows two black girls standing in what is the ‘colored’ section at the edge of the bleachers.
The whereabouts of his other classmates corresponded with The Great Migration from the south and Parks hopped on trains to look them up in Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago.
Parks reconnected with the white residents he remembered as young boys and girls. He'd been in a fist fight on the school playground with Lyle Myrick (leaning in doorway of his father's garage) that ended up in a draw, a handshake, and a friendship. He found a disillusioned and dejected Mazel Morgan living in a Chicago tenement with her ill tempered husband. As a bridge to connect with Life Magazine's white audience, he photographed some of the white workers in town.
Race is a flashpoint today. Another police shooting of a black man or boy is photographed and videotaped nearly every week. The kinds of violence felt by Gordon Parks and his former classmates were social in the form of deeply rooted segregation and bigotry. Parks was determined not to have them totally defined by it. He used images as his means of expression like another visionary man, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would use words a decade later.
Did these photographs make a difference? We’ll never know. According to the magazine, the project was stalled by the outbreak of the Korean War and in 1951 by news of President Harry Truman’s firing of Douglas McArthur.
"Back To Fort Scott" is not a dusty relic with no relevance for us today. Americans of all races are awash daily in media coverage of racial disturbances and violence. The dense coverage tends to make us feel as polarized and segregated, riven apart, as the races in Scott, Kansas in 1950. This potent little exhibition emphatically shows us how similar we are in our aspirations, all of us in the family of humanity.
Photos taken in the Robert and Jane Burke Gallery by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
Hi Paul
Great review. My wife and I saw the show a few weeks ago. I think you really captured the essence of Parks' intent.
We went to the museum during the week after one of the snow storms and saw the Parks and other exhibits. The museum felt abandoned since there were so few people visiting that day. We had the sense that we had the museum all to ourselves. Without the crowds you had the luxury of taking in the art and an appreciation of the MFA that you can take for granted. 4hours spent and not a feeling of Gallery fatigue. Wonderful day for us.
Posted by: Bill Pignato | March 14, 2015 at 11:28 AM
Bill,
My winter cultural and entertainment outings were few and far between due to incessant storms. With the place to yourselves, must have felt like a private showing of world class art. Four hours without gallery fatigue makes the case for the museum's offerings and new layout.
Posted by: Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. aka pt at large | March 14, 2015 at 01:53 PM
This is one of your most stellar (of many such) reviews yet... I've seen the show as I had read the review in the Globe and was going to the MFA. When are you going to write for the Globe - not that we'd let you stop writing for us as well?
Posted by: Bambi Good | April 12, 2015 at 12:28 PM