Edited with text by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Felix Hoffman.
Injustice, violence, the Civil Rights Movement, fashion and the arts--Gordon Parks captured half a century of the vast changes to the American cultural landscape in his multifaceted career. I Am You: Selected Works 1934–1978 reveals the breadth of his work as the first African American photographer for Vogue and Life magazines as well as a filmmaker and writer.
Reportage for major magazines dominated Parks’ work from 1948 to 1972. He chronicled black America’s struggle for equality, exposing the harsh realities of life in Harlem, institutionalized racism and shocking poverty. Parks was equally accomplished as a portraitist, capturing figures such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Duke Ellington and Ingrid Bergman. He turned his attention to film in the 1960s with social documentaries, as well as the cult classic Shaft (1971).
This volume traces all the threads of Parks’ achievement, examining the interaction between his photographic and filmic visions.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was born in Fort Scott, Kansas. He worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself, and becoming a photographer. In addition to his tenures photographing for the Farm Security Administration (1941–45) and Life (1948–72), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. He wrote numerous memoirs, novels and poetry, and received many awards, including the National Medal of Arts and more than 50 honorary degrees.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Gordon Parks: I Am You.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
New York Magazine, The Cut
Lena Rawley
…groundbreaking portraits taken throughout his career at Vogue and Life.
New York Journal of Books
Richard Rivera
an astounding book displaying the remarkable photographic talents of Gordon Parks
Crave
Miss Rosen
Parks understood that photography possessed the power to change the way we see and understand the world by speaking a language entirely its own.
The Guardian
[This] new book celebrates the breadth of photographer and film-maker Gordon Parks’s work, including his images of a racially divided south in the 1960s, his fashion work for Life and Vogue, and the heartbreaking poverty of a Harlem family.
Daily Mail Online
Charlie Moore
This extraordinary collection of images captures an America suffering from racial segregation and crippling poverty after the Second World War.
Feature Shoot
Ellyn Kali
Parks’s persistence makes us proud in 2017; the photographer loved his country, the world, and its people, and he challenged us to do better. But at the same time, looking at these pictures now comes with a lingering pang and the understanding that not all has been resolved. Those evils he battled— racism, inequality, poverty, violence— remain today.
New York Times Lens Blog
Maurice Berger
In the end, to understand these works in relationship to each other, as “Gordon Parks: I Am You” has done, is to grasp the collective brilliance of the artist’s work — the power of his imagery, which depicted people of all races in multiple media, to influence a broad national and international audience.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
In a photo essay published in the March 8, 1968 issue of Life, African-American polymath Gordon Parks wrote, "What I want. What I am. What you force me to be is what you are. 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. You are weary of the long hot summers. I am tired of the long hungered winters. We are not so far apart as it might seem. There is something about both of us that goes deeper than blood or black and white. It is our common search for a better life, a better world. I march now over the same ground you once marched. I fight for the same things you still fight for. My children's needs are the same as your children's. I too am America. America is me. It gave me the only life I know—so I must share in its survival. Look at me. Listen to me. Try to understand my struggle against your racism. There is yet a chance for us to live in peace beneath these restless skies." Shot in Alabama in 1956, this untitled photograph is reproduced from Gordon Parks: I Am You, Selected Works 1934–1978. continue to blog
"Untitled," Shady Grove, Alabama (1956), is reproduced from Gordon Parks: I Am You. Shot on assignment for the 1956 Life magazine story "Segregation in the South," it is both a heartbreaking and supremely dignified image of Southern life under Jim Crow. Less than a decade later, Parks would document Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s history-making March on Washington, which we celebrate this weekend with all our hearts.
Photograph by Gordon Parks, courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. continue to blog
On August 28, 1963, after months of organizing by civil rights leaders and labor representatives, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom convened on the National Mall. It was the largest unified action for human and economic rights that had ever taken place in the United States. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on the centennial of that president's Emancipation Proclamation, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech, enjoining the nation to put an end to discrimination and intolerance. Gordon Parks was among the many Life staffers present to record the event. His photograph, "Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington, D.C., 1963," is reproduced from the essential new overview, Gordon Parks: I Am You.
Photograph by Gordon Parks, courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.75 x 11.5 in. / 240 pgs / 200 color & b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $67.5 ISBN: 9783958291829 PUBLISHER: Steidl/The Gordon Parks Foundation/C/O Berlin AVAILABLE: 11/22/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Steidl/The Gordon Parks Foundation/C/O Berlin. Edited with text by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Felix Hoffman.
Injustice, violence, the Civil Rights Movement, fashion and the arts--Gordon Parks captured half a century of the vast changes to the American cultural landscape in his multifaceted career. I Am You: Selected Works 1934–1978 reveals the breadth of his work as the first African American photographer for Vogue and Life magazines as well as a filmmaker and writer.
Reportage for major magazines dominated Parks’ work from 1948 to 1972. He chronicled black America’s struggle for equality, exposing the harsh realities of life in Harlem, institutionalized racism and shocking poverty. Parks was equally accomplished as a portraitist, capturing figures such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Duke Ellington and Ingrid Bergman. He turned his attention to film in the 1960s with social documentaries, as well as the cult classic Shaft (1971).
This volume traces all the threads of Parks’ achievement, examining the interaction between his photographic and filmic visions.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was born in Fort Scott, Kansas. He worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself, and becoming a photographer. In addition to his tenures photographing for the Farm Security Administration (1941–45) and Life (1948–72), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. He wrote numerous memoirs, novels and poetry, and received many awards, including the National Medal of Arts and more than 50 honorary degrees.
