Harlem in Furs: Race and Fashion in the Photography of Gordon Parks

Abstract

As the first African-American working as a commercial fashion photographer for mainstream outlets like Vogue and Life and a veteran of Roy Stryker's photography division at the Farm Security Administration, Gordon Parks documented the underappreciated visual history binding consumer culture to racial politics. Never one to shy away from on-the-nose social commentary or obvious political allegory, Parks has been seen as an important-but frustratingly unsubtle-middlebrow African-American photographer. 1 This is as true of his documentary images of black American life as it is of his commercial fashion photography. The fact that Parks also worked as a staff photographer for Life magazine for twenty years is often made to serve as irrefutable proof of his moderate politics and heavy-handed social commentary. 2 However, I intend in this article to put pressure on this assumption. I argue that what has been mistaken for political moderation in Parks's work is instead a direct engagement with the violence of self-evidence that ultimately undergirds bourgeois culture and politics.Working in the visual idiom of the middle class, Parks found a broad audience for his documentary photography as well as his fashion photography. By examining both types of Parks's photography alongside one another, I intend to highlight the ways in which each stands out for its unapologetic engagement with the middle-class white Americans whom Martin Luther King, Jr. would deem "the Negro's great stumbling block." 3 Parks spoke the visual language of the white middle class. 4 His photography m ode rnism / modernity volum e twe nty thre e , num b e r four, p p 789-811. © 2016 johns hop kins unive rsity p re ss