I've written before about photographer Gordon Parks' celebrated series on segregation in the American South, but this Guardian article by Oliver Laughland - prompted by a new exhibition in London - was a welcome reminder to revisit those images.
In the piece, the exhibition's curator Bryan Stevenson - a Montgomery-based civil rights attorney - spells out the significance of Parks' decision to shoot in colour rather than black and white, for reasons that are very different to those behind (for example) Martin Parr's decision to make the same switch: "Most people only saw this community fighting segregation in this very two-dimensional way. And I think Parks understood that it was much more dynamic, much more artistic, much more interesting than those images could sometimes capture. The use of colour really animated the harm in ways that had been missed previously."
What also struck me was the headline quote from Parks: "The camera is my weapon of choice." As was discussed at the Eye Festival in October, the reality today is that the veracity of the photographic image is being questioned more than ever. Laughland acknowledges as much, asking Stevenson whether the camera still retains its capacity for truth-telling. Stevenson maintains that it does, despite the challenges - but AI is arguably now a more powerful weapon, especially in the hands of those who, unlike Parks, believe in inciting division rather than overcoming it.
(Incidentally, the segment about Parks getting his big break through working for the Farm Security Administration was a reminder that Linda Gordon's biography of Dorothea Lange is still sitting as yet unread on my shelves...)
No comments:
Post a Comment