GORDON PARKS
Captures the Atmosphere of Crime
In the year 1957, crime rates soared in many major U.S. cities as the country navigated through the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, and the consequent thrusts of major social transitions. At the time, Gordon Parks held the first long-standing position as a Black photographer of nearly 10 years for Life magazine. Commissioned by the magazine to document criminality and the policing it garnered, Parks spent six weeks seeking out lawlessness across New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
“My assignment: explore crime across America,” said Parks. “A journey through hell […] The year was 1957. I rode with detectives through shadowy districts, climbed fire escapes, broke through windows and doors with them. Brutality was rampant. Violent death showed up from dawn to dawn.”
Since Gordon Parks’ passing in 2006, the Gordon Parks Foundation has breathed life into the late photographer’s work in the form of the newly published The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957. An expansion of Parks’ original eight-page photo essay, the book features many images not previously publicized. Even now, the images are poignantly jarring and evoke a keen sense of sensitivity toward the subjects.
In the director’s foreword, Glenn D. Lowry and Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. dictate that Parks’ work “captured its subject with empathy and candor. Parks rejected media clichés associated with delinquency, drug use, and corruption, opting for a more nuanced view that reflected the social and emotional factors tied to criminal behavior and that revealed a rare glimpse of the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it.”
No stranger to the Black struggle, Parks was raised in Kansas during the era of mob lynchings and Jim Crow laws. The photographer was a first-hand witness as the country spun and tilted on its axis throughout the Civil Rights movement — the beginning of the never-ending pursuit for equality. While Parks’ images portray the dark and desolate aspects of criminality — needle marks, bloodied wounds, and dead bodies — there is quintessential gracefulness embedded in the deep hues and grainy contrasts of the work. Parks photographed the everyday person and did so with frank objectivity, regardless of race or other facets. Plainly forthwrite and yet immensely complex, The Atmosphere of Crime depicts life and crime in its true, convoluted light.
The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 was co-published with STEIDL and The Gordon Parks Foundation in collaboration with MoMA. For more information on the book, visit STEIDL’s website here.
