Department Shop, Mobile, Alabama. Gordon Parks, 1956.
This photo was a part of Gordon Parks’s 1956 photograph essay For all times Journal documenting the lifetime of the Thornton family beneath segregation in Alabama. The essay served as critical documentation of the Jim Crow South and acted as a countrywide platform for difficult racial inequality. However, his photographs seem to be quite distinct from many different iconic civil rights pictures. In an period when the simple medium for documentary images become black-and-white movie, Parks as a substitute selected to existing these quiet photographs of home existence in full shade.
His option of field matter extra units this series aside from others of the duration. Rather than specializing in the demonstrations, boycotts, and brutality that characterised the fight for racial justice, Parks emphasised the prosaic particulars of one household’s existence. In certain, his capacity to elicit empathy via and emphasis on intimacy and shared human journey made them particularly poignant.