Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957
An unsettling, yet important work by master documentary photographer Gordon Parks.
If I say to you the name Gordon Parks, what is your first thought? Gordon Parks may be a name that you struggle to recall at first, but you’ll almost certainly know of at least one piece of his work. Parks was the director of the iconic film Shaft (1971), a film that spawned a host of sequels and imitators. Parks’ talent went way beyond filmmaking. He was a poet, composer, painter, novelist, civil rights activist, filmmaker, and a photographer. Kind of makes you feel like an enormous underachiever, right?
Gordon Parks was born in 1912 in Kansas, in an era of extreme poverty, hostility, and socially ‘sanctioned’ violence towards African Americans, things which would inform his work throughout his life. Parks' photoographic journey began in 1937 when he bought his first camera from a pawn shop and taught himself how to use it. Two years later, he began to work for a local newspaper. In 1942, the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship awarded him a $1800 grant, which supported him whilst he illustrated Shakespeare in Harlem, a book of poetry written by Langston Hughes. Parks’, now making a name for himself as a skilled photographer, started work in the photography division at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a government agency tasked with documenting social concerns throughout America’s rural areas. Such was the success of the project, he started working at Life magazine in 1948, the first African-American man to do so, and by 1957, he was tasked with creating a photographic essay on the subject of crime in America, to accompany an essay written by Robert Wallace. For six weeks, Parks worked with a news reporter in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, photographing crime. Parks worked with law enforcement officials, hospitals, coroner’s offices and prisons, covering the entire timeline of crime, from perpetration to incarceration and beyond, into death.
The Atmosphere of Crime has four sections. It opens with a condensed summary on race relations in America, setting the mood by detailing the lynching of a young boy named Albert Evans, who was falsely "accused of assaulting a white girl". Though nearly 1500 people were present at the lynching, not one witness came forward to the police, so no perpetrators were arrested or charged, though a white man later admitted to the crime. This horrifying incident sets the tone for the book, and the sickening feeling in the stomach never disappears.
The opening image of a uniformed policeman, silhouetted against a night sky with neon signs providing the main source of light, eases the reader into the photographic section of the book. The undated and uncaptioned photographs don't distract the reader with extraneous information; the work is given space to breathe. A pair of detectives in a grubby hallway are shown in action: one, grimacing (or is he smiling for the camera?) aggessively kicks the door, gun in hand, whilst his partner remains calm. These sedate images give way to more violent scenes: a bloodied man on a stretcher in an ambulance; another man, seated in a police station, the bloody gaping wound on the back of his head prominent in the frame; and an incredible stomach churning image of a pair of legs which appear to have been hacked at, the skin damaged, scarred and raw. Without a caption it's impossible to know what happened to the man on the floor in another photograph. Is he alive or dead? Did he fall, or was he pushed? There is one beautifully composed image of a body on a gurney, surrounded by police, partially covered in white cloth. The scene, reflected in a puddle and taken from maybe 15 or 20 feet away, makes it difficult to discern whether the unfortunate soul on the gurney is still breathing or not.
A further essay on crime and race in America provides valuable contextual information on the photographs in TAOC. Placing this information separately from the images allows the reader to draw their own conclusions about the photographs therein. The final section of the book is a scan of the section of Life magazine that Crime in the U.S. and The Atmosphere of Crime appeared in, in their entirety
Parks strove to avoid the anti African-American rhetoric that was prevalent in the media, and chose instead to opt for truth when documenting the brutal reality of crime, regardless of the race of the perpetrator. Parks once said:
“I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera.”
His photographs clearly shows that truth, as shocking as it is.
The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 is more than a standard monograph: it is an essay on the state of crime and race relations in America that is as relevant today as it was in 1957. Parks’ images do not always make for easy viewing, but they are, without a doubt, endlessly fascinating and confirm why Parks was a master of documentary photography.
The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 is around £40 from your preferred bookseller.
Further reading Gordon Parks Foundation
New insights!
Very powerful photos and interesting words. Thank you for the reminder - I will take my Gordon Parks books down from the shelf and have another slow look through.