Gordon Parks: The South in Color
Jackson Fine Art is pleased to announce Gordon Parks: The South in Color, the spring exhibition organized in partnership with The Gordon Parks Foundation.
The exhibition marks two significant milestones: the 70th anniversary of the landmark publication of Parks’ images of the segregated South in Life magazine, and the 20th anniversary of the founding of The Gordon Parks Foundation.
The South in Color brings together more than thirty photographs from Parks’ Segregation Story series, alongside the debut of a brand-new portfolio published by the Foundation. The exhibition includes many images never before shown at the gallery, as well as some of Parks’ most iconic works — among them At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama — offering a fresh perspective on the series and deepening its emotional and historical resonance.
Curated by acclaimed American photographer Dawoud Bey, the exhibition is presented in alliance with the Foundation’s yearlong celebration of Parks and his enduring influence on the current generation of Black artists and writers. The show brings to life Bey’s 2022 essay The South in Color, published in the expanded edition of Gordon Parks: Segregation Story (2022), in which Bey reflects on the visual poetry of Parks’ photographs taken in and around Mobile, Alabama in the summer of 1956 for Life magazine. Bey writes that these photographs deserve recognition not only for the social mission that inspired them, but equally for the extraordinary quality of their making.
For this series, Parks used a handheld twin-lens Rolleiflex camera to document the daily lives of the Thornton family and their extended relatives, including the Causey and Tanner families. His choice of camera and his decision to shoot in color produced the lush, carefully composed square-format images that define the series. As Bey observes, Parks’ deliberate choices of tool, material, and sensibility lend the Black Southern subjects — often living under threat — a sense of lives fully and expressively lived. Bey’s curatorial vision opens a new window into Parks’ creative genius.
The exhibition will also premiere a limited-edition portfolio entitled The South in Color, published by The Gordon Parks Foundation to mark their 20th anniversary. The portfolio features ten photographs highlighting Parks’ close attention to children, whose presence anchors many of the series’ most powerful images. A printed version of Dawoud Bey’s essay The South in Color is included. The portfolio is issued in an edition of 25, with 5 Artist’s Proofs.
About the Author
In a career spanning more than fifty years, photographer, filmmaker, musician, and author Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006) created a groundbreaking body of work that established him as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. From the 1940s onward, he documented American life and culture with a focus on social justice, race relations, the civil rights movement, and the African American experience.
Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was drawn to photography as a young man. Despite having no formal training, he was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942, which led to a position with the photography section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C., and later the Office of War Information (OWI). By the mid-1940s, he was working as a freelance photographer for publications including Vogue, Glamour, and Ebony. In 1948 he joined Life magazine as a staff photographer, where over more than two decades he produced some of his most celebrated work.
In 1969, Parks became the first African American to write and direct a major Hollywood feature film, The Learning Tree, based on his semiautobiographical novel. His follow-up directorial work, Shaft (1971), helped define the Blaxploitation genre. Parks continued photographing, publishing, and composing music until his death in 2006.
Gordon Parks: The South in Color
April 2 – June 13, 2026
Jackson Fine Art – Atlanta, GA
