The Life And Work Of Gordon Parks

In the documentary “Half Past Autumn: The Life and Work of Gordon Parks”, the viewing audience is introduced to the celebrated African American photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, a man engaged in what he would consider an empowering act: the loading of his camera and his aiming of it at the world. In the program, Parks proposes an idea that was atypical in mainstream culture at the time; he claims that photographs could very well be forceful agents of social change.
After all, it was a commonly understood thing that cameras were instruments that could record newsworthy events, allowing visibility where there was none before. More importantly, however, cameras allow images they shoot to become “real”. It is somewhat surprising, then,

The issue of civil rights would not be relegated to simple images of black versus white under the thoughtful eye of Parks; now, the world would see all the subtle differences a splash of color could make. Take, for example, Gordon Parks’ portrait of Albert Thornton Senior sitting next to his wife of fifty-three years: an older black couple from Mobile, Alabama may seem to have little in common with the images commonly associated with civil rights photography, but its image still mattered a great deal. Even though its subject matter was neither newsworthy nor historic, unlike the more widely circulated images of racial murders, police brutality, and boycotts that became cultural touchstones for racial justice, it still cried out for its own kind of justice. Simply a picture taken on assignment for a September 1956 Life magazine photo-essay, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” it managed to document the everyday activities and rituals of an extended black family living in the rural South under Jim Crow segregation. By allowing the American people a chance to see the normalcy in the lives of black people, Parks helped close the racial divide between families both white and colored. The portrait became representative of African American normalcy (Wallace

Somehow, though, these religious and law-abiding people, and others like them, were discriminated against. It is this incongruity, made visible by Gordon Parks’ photographs, which may have appealed to the empathy and fairness of some of Life’s white readers. It forced them to reconsider both their attitudes about segregation and the stereotypes they assigned to people who, as it turns out, were not as different from themselves as they previously may have believed.
It is the very fullness, even ordinariness, of the lives of the Thornton family that most effectively contests these notions of difference, which had flourished in a popular culture that offered no more than an incomplete or distorted view of African-American life. Complete and positive images also helped to bolster the morale of African Americans in the face of undaunted prejudice. This is the reason why the photographer’s subdued portrait of the Thorntons is an important civil rights image, demonstrating as it does the historic role of photography in black