Gordon Parks escaped a segregated childhood in Kansas and remade American visual culture—then took his fight from the page to the screen.
The best-known Gordon Parks images feel like they arrived already etched into public memory—so complete, so formally sure of themselves, that it can be easy to forget how much resistance they contain. The photographs are not simply records of what happened. They are arguments about what deserves to be seen, what counts as evidence, and who gets to author the story of American life.