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He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s (taken for a federal government project), for his photographic essays for Life magazine,

Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, Parks was drawn to photography as a young man when he saw images of migrant workers in a magazine. After buying a camera at a pawnshop, he taught himself how to use it.

Gordon Parks was one of the most groundbreaking figures in 20th century photography. His photojournalism during the 1940s to the 1960s reveals important aspects of American culture, and he became known for focusing on issues of civil rights, poverty, race relations and urban life.

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“American Gothic,” Washington, D.C., 1942.

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“American Gothic,” Washington, D.C., 1942.

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Parks approached a black charwoman who was cleaning the FSA ofﬁces. Her name was Ella Watson. She told Parks she had become pregnant out of high school, and that her husband had been shot to death two days before their second daughter was born. She was now working to support herself and her two grandchildren. This photograph is titled American Gothic, in which Watson poses coolly with a mop and broom in front of the U.S. ﬂag. Among the most famous pictures Parks ever took, it points to the complexity of his mature style.

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Gordon Parks often approached his subjects from below, placing the buildings that framed their lives as backgrounds rising behind them, and attempted to catch people looking askance in ways that suggest resilience.

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How self-taught photographer Gordon Parks became a master storyteller

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Parks was the ﬁrst black correspondent to work for the Ofﬁce of War Information, and one of his initial assignments was to photograph African-American pioneers of another kind: the ﬁrst unit of black fighter pilots to serve in the American Army’s Air Corps, as part of the 332nd Fighter Group—known more famously as the Tuskegee Airmen. This photo reveal Parks’ heartfelt admiration for the men, their mission, and their accomplishments.

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Red Jackson - Harlem Gang Leader in New York, 1948

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Red Jackson - Harlem Gang Leader in New York, 1948

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The ﬁrst story that Parks proposed to Life magazine was a piece on the gang wars that were consuming Harlem in the late 1940s. The great challenge was to gain to the trust of gang members. Parks found success when he met Red Jackson, a young black man who led a gang known as the Midtowners.

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Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan, 1950

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Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan, 1950

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A year after Life hired him, the magazine sent Parks back to Fort Scott, Kansas, where he had spent his ﬁrst sixteen years, attending the town’s small segregated schools. His main goal was to show the life of Detroit’s residents and in this photo, he shows a couple on a Sunday morning going to Church as they are dressed elegantly.

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Pastor Ledbetter, Chicago, Illinois, 1953

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Pastor Ledbetter, Chicago, Illinois, 1953

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During a 1953 trip to Chicago for Life, Parks returned to neighborhoods he had photographed in the 1940s, searching for subjects to illustrate an article that would be titled “The Modern Shouting Baptist.” His quest led him to the Reverend Ernest Franklin Ledbetter, pastor of the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, which he had photographed years earlier. Parks admired the pastor’s resolve, and the hours he spent each day at prayer with members of his congregation to help them endure the subjugation that many experienced in their jobs.

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Segregation in the South - Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

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Segregation in the South - Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

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In the wake of the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Life asked Parks to go to Alabama and document the racial tensions entrenched there. He would compare his ﬁndings with his own troubled childhood in Fort Scott, Kansas, and with the relatively progressive and integrated life he had enjoyed in Europe. In this photo, it demonstrates a sign that states “Colored entrance” which depicts the mother and daughter near the entrance that was designated for them at that time period because of segregation.

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Brooklyn, NY native Danny Lyon helped define a mode of photojournalism in which the photographer is deeply and personally embedded in his subject matter. A self-taught photographer and a graduate of the University of Chicago, Lyon began his photographic career in the early 1960s as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a national group of college students who joined together after the first sit-in by four African American college students at a North Carolina lunch counter. From 1963 to 1964, Lyon traveled the South and Mid-Atlantic regions documenting the Civil Rights Movement.  The photographs were published in  The Movement, a documentary book about the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and later in Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Lyon’s own memoir of his years working for the SNCC.

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Cairo, IL. 1962 - An all-white swimming pool

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Cairo, IL. 1962 - An all-white swimming pool

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One of high school student Taylor Washington's numerous arrests is immortalized as he yells while passing before me. The photograph became the cover of SNCC's photo book, The Movement, and was reproduced in the former Soviet Union in Pravda, captioned "Police Brutality USA."

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Cortland Cox, Phyllis Cunningham, and Worth Long at SNCC's Waveland conference, November 1965

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Cortland Cox, Phyllis Cunningham, and Worth Long at SNCC's Waveland conference, November 1965

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SNCC stood for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and it was a civil-rights group formed to give younger blacks more of a voice in the civil rights movement.