Gordon Parks - Boy with June Bug - Fort Scott, Kansas
GORDON PARKS - (1912-2006)
Fort Scott, Kansas
8" x 10" (Image Size)
Print in Colors
By the 1960s, having produced fashion, news, and portrait photographs for various publications, Parks set his sights on documenting social issues. As a staff photographer for Life magazine, he published many photo-essays, including “How It Feels to Be Black” (1963). Based on his first novel, a semiautobiographical story of an African American boy growing up in Parks’s hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, the photo-essay illustrates experiences both positive, such as the moment of summertime leisure pictured here, and negative, including the impact of racism on the boy’s family. Through his work for Life, Parks offered readers a personal point of entry for the issue of racism, presented in ways they could relate to and empathize with.