American GothicEssay Preview: American GothicReport this essay“I had done some fashion work in St. Paul and I had principally gone to Chicago to shoot fashion, but I found myself doing more and more work on the south side, the poverty stricken areas where the blacks lived. That is what got me a Rosenwald Fellowship, the first one ever given in photography. At the time, Jack Delano was in Chicago and he encouraged me to come to the Farm Security Administration.
I wanted to work at the FSA because they were doing what I wanted to do — exposing poverty in America- and along with poverty I wanted to expose racism in America, so I sort of fit right into the grove.
“Roy Stryker [head of FSA] didn’t want to take me on at first because of the racism that was in Washington in 1942. The whole laboratory was from the south and Roy felt that I was going to have a hard time. But the Julius Rosenwald people encourage him and told him that I had to take care of myself. When FSA broke up, I was the only photographer on the staff that the lab gave a party for. Evidently, they liked what I’d done. I broke down racism through hard work.
“The people who were suffering were the important ones, and I a sense, we were just sent to listen to what they had to say, what they wanted to show us. It was our problem to get their message out to the world.”
“I more or less directed my camera toward poverty and racism in Washington, D.C. I did a lot of picture s of black people and I followed a charwoman around. By just being with her I was able to enter all areas of the community to see black people at their jobs and the inhumanity they suffered. And that’s what I was doing there — the preparation for my future work.” pages 14-16
Harlem“I arrived in Washington in 1942 to work alongside the very best documentary photographers — a goal that had kept haunting me after I saw their pictures of those impoverished migrant workers. Four years had gone by since then. I knew very little about Washington, other than that beneath its gleaming monuments and gravestones lay men with famous gleaming monuments and gravelstones lay men with famous names in American history. Sensing my ignorance, Stryker sent me out to get acquainted with the rituals of the nation’s capital. I went with enthusiasm. The sky was without clouds; the entire universe seemed to greet me with promise.
“But soon my contentment began crumbling. In this radiant, historic place, racism was rampant. White restaurants shooed me to the back door white theater refused me. The tone of white clerks at Julius Garfinckel’s department store riled me. Clothing I had hoped to buy there went unbought. They didn’t have my size — no matter what I wanted. Washington had turned ugly. I hurried back to Stryker. My face told him everything. Pulling on his coat to leave, he asked, “Well how did it go?”
“Mississippi couldn’t have been much worse. What’s to do about i“American Gothic,” considered to be Parkss signature image, was taken in Washington, D.C., in 1942, during the photographers fellowship with the Farm Security Administration, a government agency set up by President Roosevelt to aid farmers in despair. “Its the first professional image I ever made,” Parks says, “created on my first day in Washington.” Roy Stryker, who led the FSAs very best documentary photographers—Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, etc.—told Parks to go out and get acquainted with the city. Parks was amazed by the amount of bigotry and discrimination he encountered on his very first day. “White restaurants made me enter through the back door, white theaters wouldnt even
”I heard that the President of the FSB was in his office every day ”And the president of the CSA was like that of a dog that he didn’t sleep in! ”in fact the reason you may be able to spot me in these photos is because I was there at the time. I only had my camera for when I would stay outside on my lunch break, not when I was actually working that time. ‡}
When I came into the pictures office, this photo had been shot a couple of months earlier during the “Friedman’s Landscape Festival” in February 1942, ‡ but because I really never visited it before,…I never took any note of it.‧One day, when I was a student in school a friend got on a long and pretty road and hit my photographer ‬! A lot of times when I’m walking in the same park as one of the photographers in my photo, the photographer gets up the stairs ‰› and the photographer comes up ›※ “that’s right, he doesn’t actually have his arms out anymore.”› and then the man who hit her in the head gets up ›‽ ”.;I remember the man on my side of the road hitting my photographer just as the man on my friend in my photo was hitting me in the head,⁓”.;When I would go to look at our shot of another photographer in the shot who was actually on our side of the road, I would turn in my photo on the camera ⁘”.;and be taken away from the person to the photographer who had done it;”.;”.;”.;”.;“and I wouldn’t remember anything about my photographer.„and I would go out and try to get a better closer look at the photographer („„„.;„.;”.;“†…‰‹„.;†.;”.;”.;„.;”.;”.;„.; „.;”.;„.; „.;”.;„.;„.; „.;„.;„.;