Bare Witness—Photographs by Gordon Parks

Novelist, memoirist, poet, film director, choreographer, and musician, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was renowned as a man of many talents. He is best known as a photographer, a career he took up in the 1930s. Starting with fashion and portraiture, he honed his skill and his passion for documenting social ills working for the New Deal's Farm Security Administration. During World War II he became the first black photographer employed by the War Office of Information. After the war, he became Life magazine's first black staff photographer and established an international reputation publishing images and photo-essays that helped transform and liberalize American society by informing Americans about the plight of the urban poor. Maren Stange, an authority on documentary photography, provides an introduction to his work, surveying his career and analyzing the distinguished qualities of his compelling images. This catalog accompanies the traveling exhibition organized by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.

Maren Stange is a faculty member at Cooper Union and scholar of American documentary photography. Stange holds degrees in American Studies from Harvard and Boston Universities, and is the author of Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photographs, 1890-1950.