M_FM_025 AMERICAN / ESTONIAN GOTHIC _ GORDON PARKS 1942 / KUMARI VAIM 2025 #EndelLeppFashionMEEZ #FotoMEEZ
These Historical Photos
17h
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As the 15th child of black Kansas sharecroppers, Gordon Parks knew poverty. But he didn’t experience virulent racism until he arrived in Washington in 1942 for a fellowship at the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Parks, who would go on to became the first African-American photographer at LIFE, was stunned.
“White restaurants made me enter through the back door. White theaters wouldn’t even let me in the door,” he recalled. Refusing to be cowed, Parks searched out older African Americans to document how they dealt with such daily indignities and came across Ella Watson, who worked in the FSA’s building.
She told him of her life of struggle, of a father murdered by a lynch mob, of a husband shot to death. He photographed Watson as she went about her day, culminating in his American Gothic, a clear parody of Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 oil painting.
It served as an indictment of the treatment of African Americans by accentuating the inequality in “the land of the free” and came to symbolize life in pre-civil rights America.
“What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism,” Parks later observed, “by showing the people who suffered most under it.” Kuva vähem
— kohas nimega Kansas.
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"At first, I asked her about her life, what it was like, and so disastrous that I felt that I must photograph this woman in a way that would make me feel or make the public feel about what Washington D.C., was in 1942. So I put her before the American flag with a broom in one hand and a mop in another. And I said, "American Gothic"—that's how I felt at the moment. I didn't care about what anybody else felt. That's what I felt about America and Ella Watson's position inside America."
–Gordon Parks, 1998.
Gordon Parks’s 1942 portrait of government worker Ella Watson, which he famously titled American Gothic, is among the most celebrated and influential photographs of the 20th century. Created as part of an extensive collaboration between the photographer and his subject, it is at once a record of one woman’s position within the racial, professional, and economic hierarchies that stratified the nation’s capital and Parks’s visual reckoning with the realities of Black life in racially segregated Washington, D.C. Remarkably layered and yet instantly legible, American Gothic communicated a complex of injustices with the barest of means: a flag, a woman, a broom, a mop. Its canny allusions to other icons of modern American visual culture, including Grant Wood’s painting of the same title, strengthen the impact of what Parks described as “an indictment of America.” This exhibition and its accompanying publication is the first in-depth survey of this formative project in Parks’s career, providing a context for understanding how American Gothic became one of the defining images of the ongoing struggle for civil rights.
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