Cryptic image of rising dissent
Gordon Parks’s photo of crowd invites us to discern their emotions
It’s the look on the women’s face, front left, that gets you: Dubious but hopeful, a seen-itall weariness behind those sunglasses that’s still left room for a glimmer of optimism, however faint. We don’t know what she’s looking at or who she’s listening to, but the young man behind her, whose broad grin conveys an unleavened joy, offers a clue: He holds an issue of Muhammed Speaks, a newspaper produced by the Nation of Islam; the adoration in his eyes suggests they’re focused on one of the newspaper’s creators, Malcolm X himself.
It’s Harlem, 1963, a time and place Gordon Parks was photo- graphing with deep commitment and purpose. Parks was the first African-American photographer hired at Vogue, by visionary art director Alexander Lieberman, but quickly directed his attention from fashion to the racial inequities.
Working for Life magazine, Parks turned his lens to gang violence in Harlem in the1940s, and dug deep into its intractable social ills.
Parks, who grew up in rural Kansas, had moved north looking for a better life; he found it, for the most part, but made a life’s work of those who didn’t share his luck.
We don’t know if Malcolm X is the subject of their gaze — Parks calls it only Untitled, Harlem. What we do know is, that same year, Parks was working intently in his “Black Muslim” series, a voluminous black-and-white photo essay meant to capture the rising dissent in the Afri- can-American community over the shortcomings of civil rights — its slow pace, its tokenism, its cautious ambitions. No one took more pictures of X than Parks, who was given almost unfettered access. The moment seems almost casual, a visual break from the formal rigour of Parks’ project, captured in passing, maybe on the way home.
Later that year, President John F. Kennedy, civil rights’ staunchest ally, would be shot dead. In 1964, Cassius Clay would join the movement, becoming Muhammad Ali. Less than a year later, Malcolm X would be shot dead, too. In America today, race relations have perhaps never been more fraught, and this after eight years of an African-American president.
For every step forward, that many more back, in a cycle as reliable as it is demoralizing. And you circle back to that dubious wince, all those years ago, bundled up under a blue kerchief, and you wonder if it’s hope that you see.