English 1301
Almighty
VisualAnalysisEssay-draft.docxNguyen 2
Huong Nguyen
Professor’s name
English 1301
February 21, 2018
“Segregation Only” – Outside Looking In
Gordon Parks is black American, who spent his two weeks on assignment in Alabama. Then, he published 12-page photo essay in September 1956 issued by LIFE magazine with Robert Wallace’s article “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” Parks’ images gave the world a new look at the civil right movement. Parks shows the readers how black families lived under Jim Crow law – the law that enforced racial segregation in the South in 1877 and the beginning of the Civil Right Movement in the 1950s. After sixty years missing, those images – “Segregation Story” are on view again.
Jim Crow law is a designation for black Americans’ segregated life. From late 1870s, Southern state legislatures, no longer controlled by carpetbaggers and freedmen, passed laws requiring the separation of whites from “persons of colour” in public transportation and schools. The segregation principle was extended to parks, cemeteries, theaters, and restaurants in an effort to prevent any contact between blacks and whites as equals.
Gordon Parks has been successful to show the world how black Americans’ life through his work and what hidden behind “Segregation Story.” The picture has a group of children peers across a chain-link fence into a whites-only playground with a Ferris wheel. Although they had access to a “separate but equal” recreational area in their own neighborhood, this photograph captures the allure of this other, inaccessible space. The children, likely innocent to the cruel implication of their exclusion, longingly reach their hands out to the mysterious and forbidden arena beyond. This pristinely manicured lawn on the other side of the fence contrasts with overgrowth of weeds in the foreground suggesting the persistent reality of racial inequality.
The more I see of Parks’ work, the more I admire it. A sense of history, truth and injustice; a sense of beauty; above all, a sense of composition and knowing the right time to take a photograph to tell the story. It’s all there, right in front of us, in most of the photograph. Photograph of institutionalized racism and the American apartheid, “the state of being apart”, laid bare for all to see. The most intimate moment of beauty that brings me to tears, the photograph at the bottom of the posting Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956. Just look at the light that Parks uses, this drawing light. And then use of depth of field, color, composition (horizontal, vertical and diagonal elements) that leads the eye into the image and the utter, what can you say, engagement – no – quiescent knowingness of children. This’s a wondrous thing.
Notice the contrast range allowing shadow detail and highlight areas to be held in balance. Also notice how in the image Parks lets the eye settle in the center of the image – in this image, the out focus of the playground and only focus the six young girls. This creates “separate but equal” and racial inequality for black Americans.
Parks uses the two elements – composition and highlighting/ light – so intelligential. He gives me an idea that “A picture contains million words.” Composition and highlighting give this image an emotional appeal to viewers with a message “separate but equal” – “A visual argument against the oppressive nature of segregation.” “In 1941, Parks began a tenure photographing for the Farm Security Administration under Roy Striker, following in the footsteps of great social action photographers including Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. ‘I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,’ Parks told an interviewer in 1999. ‘I knew at that point I had to have a camera.’
Work sites:
· http://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/archive/segregation-story-1956?view=slider#6
· https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/revisiting-gordon-parkss-segregation-story-60-years-later/#!
· https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law
