BOY WITH JUNE BUG, KANSAS (1963) BY GORDON PARKS

In 1948, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) became the first AfricanAmerican photographer to join the permanent staff at Life magazine. During his two-decade tenure, he produced seminal essays on segregation in the South, Harlem gangs, Malcolm X,

Martin Luther King Jr and the Black Panthers.

The picture above, part of a presentation of Parks’s work at Frieze Masters art fair this weekend, is from How It Feels to Be Black, a photo-essay linked to his first novel, The Learning Tree (1963). A semi-autobiographical tale of a boy growing up in Parks’s hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, it evokes a time when tying string around a June bug’s leg and flying it like a kite was a popular summer pastime. alisonjacquesgallery.com