BmoreArt

Entering the narrow gallery of Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits from the Corcoran Collection, a visitor’s eyes are drawn first to an orange-colored wall at the far end where three photos are hung. In the center, a closed-eyed Black man in a suit with raised, outstretched hands seems to be in thrall of a profound sensation. This is reinforced by the image’s slight blurriness, the way the man is shot from below which makes him seem to levitate a bit, and very faint letters in the white background. Perhaps if you squint, you can make out that the letters spell “truth”?

To the left of this otherworldly image is one that’s completely grounded in the corporeal: an extreme close-up of the face of a bare-chested Muhammad Ali, so close you can make out individual pores and beads of sweat. Flanking it to the right is Malcolm X caught in full oration mode. Through the lighting on his face, his placement at the center of the composition, and the blurred fingertips gesturing towards the viewer, Park captures the leader’s power to command, and hold, attention. Three versions of masculinity and power in various forms—athlete, leader, and, as it turns out, pastor.

Drawing primarily from NGA’s own Corcoran Collection photos, Gordon Parks focuses on one component of Parks’ creative output, his human portraiture. It comprises 25 black-and-white portraits of individuals or small groups taken from the 1940s into the 70s. 

How Parks managed to produce countless images often, like this trio, so tonally and technically distinct from each other is the concern of this exhibition. It finds the answer in Parks’ second 1948 book, Camera Portraits: The Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraits. This proves an insightful, as well as shrewd, way to find a common thread to what otherwise might appear an assembly of disparate elements.   

In his book, Parks lays out some guiding principles for portraits grounded in study of the portrait subject. “He argued that people making portrait photographs should get out of the studio and photograph people in the places where they live and work,” said Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, at the show’s opening. “He also insisted that they had to spend a significant amount of time doing research on these people to understand their lives, what motivated them.” In addition, the photographer should be an attentive observer of their movements and personality, all “that contributes to the sitter’s individuality,” in Parks’ words.  

Self-taught, Parks married this documentary approach and his background in fashion and studio photography with a deep-seated social conscience, famously writing in his memoir, “I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America—poverty, racism, discrimination.” 

Gordon Parks is divided into two sections, “everyday people” and celebrities. Among the most powerful images from the former are those taken in a series based in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas about the effects of school segregation. Shot in 1950 on assignment for Life magazine (as its first Black staff photographer), Parks focuses on the subjects’ unyielding dignity and resilience in spite of the discrimination and racism that confronted them. The seated 98-year-old “Mrs. Jefferson” is seen in profile, her chin tilted up, the light burnishing her cheekbones and wrinkled hands. It’s a regal pose for a woman born in the slavery era. 

Not surprisingly, the iconic 1942 “American Gothic”, arguably Parks’ most famous picture, is also included. In it, cleaner Ella Watson stands with a mop and broom framing her; an out-of-focus American flag serves as the backdrop. The gap between her lived experience and the country’s promise of equality and opportunity for all its citizens, conveyed in such an economical manner, couldn’t be starker. Recognizing the photo’s devastating indictment of American society, his boss at the government agency that employed them was reported to have warned, “You’re going to get us all fired.” Indeed, “Washington, D.C. Government Charwoman,” as it was originally titled, was not published until several years later. 

Among Parks’ celebrity portraits are dreamily absorbed musician Duke Ellington listening to a playback of his own music, stone-faced writer Richard Wright looking just over his shoulder at the camera, and fiery Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who Parks has posed pensively with pipe in hand, The Autobiography of Malcolm X laying open on his lap. 

Parks’ background in fashion and studio photography gave him a particular genius for juxtaposing the background and the portrait sitter, as in Ella Watson and the flag, to expose contradiction or to underline a point. But he could also have a sense of humor about his sometimes too on-the-nose staging. Mid-century composer Samuel Barber’s portrait is steeped in the clichés of studio portraits, but Parks adds twists. The painted backdrop features a lightning strike; a pole decorated with an artificial plant is an intrusive prop in the foreground. Parks further plays with conventions by leaving visible the gap between the backdrop curtain and the brick wall behind.

The narrow corridor-like gallery space is an apt manifestation of Gordon Parks’ impulse to distill the photographer’s long and varied career into a manageable thesis. It certainly fosters the kind of close study of fellow humans that characterized Parks. On a busy Saturday afternoon, there was some friendly jostling among museum-goers to read the lengthy wall labels (doing their part to provide welcome context on Parks’ photo-taking process) and to claim space simply to stand still in front of a photo and look beauty and injustice in the face.

If Gordon Parks is a straight line with a narrow aperture on an artist’s body of work, This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance is a squiggly doodle of biography and art elements that resists simplification.  

The exhibit’s form of portraiture of a single man is to assemble, instead, a “collective” one, showing Baldwin as the nexus of important social, cultural, and political circles and the reverberating influences flowing to and from him. Taking inspiration from the 2019 exhibit curated by Hilton Als rendered recently in the book God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, National Portrait Gallery Director of Curatorial Affairs, Rhea L. Combs, pulls particularly on the strands of civil rights and queer identity. (The Pulitzer-prize winning New Yorker staff writer consulted with her on this exhibit). This Morning, This Evening, includes not only visual arts in diverse mediums—paintings, photos, video installations—but also archival media like letters, scribbled notes, books, and even an album cover.

“There’s a notion here of Baldwin’s ‘chosen family’: individuals who really inspired him as part of his chosen family while he was alive,” Combs said in an interview with BmoreArt, “but also people who were inspired by him and who would be part of his legacy.”

Born in Harlem, Baldwin spent chunks of time in France and Turkey but was frequently drawn back to the United States. The exhibit’s title is taken from a Baldwin 1960 short story about a Black singer returning from France to the US. 

Appropriately, it’s Baldwin’s gaze that greets the visitor upon crossing the threshold of the single-roomed exhibit celebrating the centennial of his birth.

Beauford Delaney’s pastel portrait of Baldwin in vivid tones of orange and blue against a yellow background capture the sitter’s recognizably protuberant eyes, high forehead, and slight frame. More than a physical likeness, it channels the Baldwin who was open to connection but wary, holding some part of himself back. 

Delaney, whose self-portrait is on the opposite wall, served as an early mentor, longtime friend, and model of gay Black identity to Baldwin. Throughout his life, Baldwin had a talent for divining those who could nurture him—letters between him and his childhood teacher, Orilla Winfield, are displayed nearby—and offering that same kind of support to others.  

To this point, behind a floating wall that separates the far side of the room, Baldwin’s soulful friendships with singer-activist Nina Simone and their mutual friend, lauded playwright Lorraine Hansberry, are highlighted. Several Bernard Gotfryd black-and-white photographs show Simone and Baldwin with broad smiles, heads tilted towards each other, capturing their joy in each other’s company.

A video of Simone’s 1969 performance of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” runs on a continuous loop. Hansberry isn’t shown with Baldwin, but her presence is evoked through archival media, such as the letter she anonymously contributed to The Ladder, one of the earliest lesbian serial publications. 

Come back around the floating wall and you move from more of the Baldwin-centered material into the territory of those he has influenced. This includes a handful of past and present leading Black visual artists. In Glenn Ligon’s monochromatic “Hands/Stranger in the Village,” text from Baldwin’s 1953 essay that defines the other-ing of Black presence in Western culture is layered on top of images of upraised Black hands. A coat of black coal dust partially obscures both.   

A large case on the floor that dominates the center of the room displays a Faith Ringgold story quilt honoring filmmaker Marlon Riggs. Ringgold put Riggs’ portrait in the center, framed by quotes from Baldwin and writer Audre Lorde among others. Baldwin’s face hovers in a square above as one of the chief influences on the director of Tongues Untied, the landmark 1989 cinematic exploration of gay Black male identity. 

It is harder to discern the Baldwin connection to Barbara Jordan: a video installation by Donald Moffett features the gay Black Congresswoman’s speech in support of the impeachment of President Nixon, which competes with Simone’s singing wafting from the other side of the room. Or, for a viewer not steeped in the art world, to fully limn the invisible threads linking a photo of a grinning bell hooks and Marlon Riggs in the early 1990s taken by Lyle Ashton Harris.

Oh, wait, there’s a vitrine wedged in a corner on this side you might miss spotlighting civil rights and gay rights champion Bayard Rustin. Though credited as architect of the 1963 March on Washington, as the label in the case says, “Rustin was marginalized in large part due to his sexuality.” The original set of fingerprints taken at Rustin’s arrest in 1946 for allegedly offering to commit a lewd or indecent act are more powerful almost than any created piece—a smattering of black and white whorls and bureaucratic fonts, the indelible record of sanctioned discrimination. 

The tendency to lose your way navigating This Morning, This Evening feels like an expression of its ambitious remit: a layout representing not a linear schematic but a dynamic interweaving moving backwards and forwards in time. If some individual nodes of connection feel occasionally too attenuated, they still provoke consideration (on a recent visit, I saw lots of visitors prompted to extensive googling). Assembling a mosaic portrait from scattered pieces, after all, invites picking up and admiring individual tessera and figuring out its place in the whole. 

The curatorial impulses behind Gordon Parks and This Morning, This Evening run in opposite directions. One towards orderly compression, the other to diffusion. A lone observer contrasted with the pivot point of chosen communities. A single medium versus, well—every kind. What they have in common is that their limitations spotlight the need for future exhibits to explore other facets of their expansive subjects and their oeuvres. 

I did find one project where Parks and Baldwin formally shared the same artistic space, in the pages of the 1976 Black Photographers Annual. Baldwin wrote the Introduction, Parks the Foreword. 

Baldwin’s essay is a deep reading of photos included in the publication, x-rays of the psyches of individuals embedded in a deeply unequal and racist American society. His searing anger and despair is counterbalanced, in typical Baldwin fashion, by the prospect of freedom and profound love for his fellow Black Americans. He concludes the piece, “Nothing lasts forever, not even our suffering, and we have everything to celebrate: ourselves.”

The artists’ dual calling to celebrate and the responsibility to bear witness to Black American experience, which Baldwin and Park each did in his own ways, are intertwined. In the Foreword, Parks wrote a short verse that he dedicated to his fellow Black artists, offering them this invitation, or challenge: 

“America’s past is not our shame. 

We stand above it. 

Who better to measure our height—

        but you?”

*** 

Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits from the Corcoran Collection is at the National Gallery of Art until January 12, 2025; admission free. This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance is at the National Portrait Gallery until April 20, 2025; admission free.

Header Images (L-R): Gordon Parks. Self-Portrait, 1941, gelatin silver print. National Gallery of Art, Washington, purchased as the Gift of Alan and Marsha Paller, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Marc Andreessen via the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Raj and Indra Nooyi, Mitchell P. Rales, David M. Rubenstein, and Darren Walker in honor of Sharon Percy Rockefeller. Anthony Barboza. “James Baldwin”, reproduction of gelatin silver print, 1975. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the Loewentheil Family. Installation photo by Mark Gulezian.