Magazines and Newspapers Center, 5th Floor Main

Gordon Parks, Photographer for Life magazine

2025-02-28T12:20:00.000-08:00

Last month we kicked off More Than a Month, SFPL's celebration of Black culture and heritage, with a talk by JPC archivist Jehoiada Calvin about the work of Moneta Sleet, Jr., staff photographer at Ebony magazine for more than four decades. Today we are looking at the work of Gordon Parks, the first Black staff photographer for Life magazine, a publication that featured his photographs for many decades. Additionally, his photographs of many sorts appeared in the pages of Vogue, Ebony, Fortune, and Glamour magazines.

Parks was a true renaissance man, not being limited to photography, although his magazine work is the focus of this blog post. He created landmark films that repositioned the agency of Black characters, transforming them into protagonists in their own right; he composed classical music pieces; he wrote novels; he exercised avidly. In short he was a well rounded man of arts and letters.

Gordon Parks, as seen in the monograph The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957

Gordon Parks

In a profile in a 1997 issue of Life, Jimmie Briggs describes an 84-year-old Parks lighting his pipe in frustration after a jogging accident slowed him down with two torn Achilles tendons. Up until then he went on regular jogs most days of the week; having been laid up by the injury, he used his extra time to work on his next novel and compose a piano sonata dedicated to his children.

In the piece, Parks says of his famous photo American Gothic (1942), which features Ella Watson holding a broom upside down in front of an American flag with a mop propped in the background, "I didn't think it would be published. It was an indictment of the government" (p. 94).

For more biographical information about Parks, visit the website of the Parks Foundation.

1957 Assignment to NYC, Chicago, SF, and LA

At the Baltimore Art Museum, Parks's photographs from a 1957 Life magazine photo essay titled "The Atmosphere of Crime" are part of a new exhibit of works from the permanent collection. A gift from Gail and Tony Ganz, the 2019 pigment-based inkjet prints showcase Parks's photographs divorced from the text with which they originally appeared, freeing the photographs to arrest the attention of museum-goers without the heavy rhetoric of the article.

One of our librarians was fortunate to recently view the exhibit and learn of Parks's work and was eager to use SFPL's Life Magazine Archive to check it out. (Did you know SFPL provides access to every Life magazine article from Nov 23, 1936 through May 1, 2000 in this online archive?)

Photographic prints created in 2019 from Parks's negatives of his 1957 assignment for Life magazine on exhibit at the Baltimore Art Museum

For the original piece, Parks, by this time having worked as a staff photographer for Life for a decade, and reporter Henry Suydan traveled from New York City to Chicago to San Francisco and Los Angeles, shadowing police on their daily assignments. Parks later said, "My assignment: explore crime across America. 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" (The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, page 5).

Cover of the Sept 9, 1957 issue of Life

Apparently, Parks and Suydan briefed Life journalist Robert Wallace on their field reporting. Wallace has the byline for the article, so he must have been the one to dig deep into the pearl-clutching tendencies of Life magazine readers without synthesizing the realities found by Gordon and Suydan on the trip. The separation of the work of the field reporters and the work of the author of the published words can explain the disconnect between the cinematic nuance of Parks's photographs and the article's content. Where Parks's photographs allude to the seen as much as the unseen, gesturing at the humanity of all subjects of his photographs, the article does little to contemplate the racial motivation at the center of of the law enforcement in the USA during this time period.

The photo essay was published in the September 9, 1957 issue of Life magazine, without so much as a credit to Parks or Suydan.

See for Yourself

Click "Access now (PDF)" in the Life magazine archive to view the photo essay, "The Atmosphere of Crime" digitally.

Additionally, a book of the work with accompanying essays was published in 2021 and SFPL owns two copies of this book.

To see more work like this from Parks's early Life oeuvre, check out the following two Life photo essays:

Harlem Gang Leader, November 1, 1948, Life magazine. Click "Access now (PDF)" in the Life magazine archive to view a PDF of the photo essay.

The Restraints: Open and Hidden, September 24, 1956, Life magazine. Click "Access now (PDF)" in the Life magazine archive to view a color PDF of the photo essay.

Parks Interview in the History Makers

No one can really get enough of Parks, so now you can check out his 2001 interview that is featured in the new SFPL database The HistoryMakers, a collection of interviews and oral histories with Black Americans.

Click the image above to access Parks's History Makers interview

Tutorial: Read Essence Magazine on Flipster and in Print

2025-02-20T11:40:00.000-08:00

Tutorial: Read Essence Magazine on Flipster and in Print

Wed., February 26, 2025, 11 am - 12 noon
Fri., February 28, 2025, 1 pm - 2 pm (Encore)
Computer Training Center, 5th Floor Main Library

Find out how to use the Library’s tools to read Essence magazine online and in print and get help troubleshooting Flipster, the eMagazines platform. Bring your iPad, smart phone, or tablet for hands-on help using the Flipster app. Library computers will also be available.

Did you know SFPL provides access to the complete archive of Essence magazine issues? Learn how to use the Periodical Finder tool to look up different ways to read Essence through the Library, with an emphasis on reading new issues on Flipster. We’ll also have a selection of vintage Essence issues from the Main Library’s bound magazine collection on hand for you to browse. Every month the new issue of Essence is on display in the 5th floor reading room at the Main Library, as well as at eleven other SFPL locations.

Essence magazine was founded in 1968 as a lifestyle magazine directed at upscale African American women and the first issue was published in May 1970. Since then it has been continuously published on a regular basis (in 2020 it switched from a monthly to a bi-monthly) and remains a pillar in Black publishing. Read about the magazine’s 50th anniversary on the Essence website to learn more about the life and legacy of the people who made the magazine into a singular publication with a unique voice. Check out co-founder Edward Lewis’s autobiography The Man from Essence: Creating a Magazine for Black Women to learn about the magazine from a firsthand entrepreneurial perspective.

Flipster is an eMagazines platform that works on a desktop Internet browser or as an app on your iOS or Android device. Read more about Flipster.

Librarians from the Magazines and Newspapers Center will be on hand to lead this workshop and offer personalized support to participants.

Attending Programs

All programs are drop-in (no registration necessary) unless otherwise noted. All SFPL locations are wheelchair accessible. For accommodations (such as ASL), call (415) 557-4557 or contact accessibility@sfpl.org. Requesting at least 3 business days in advance will help ensure availability.

This program will be conducted in English unless otherwise noted.

Notice: This event may be filmed or photographed. By participating in this event, you consent to have your likeness used for the Library’s archival purposes and promotional materials. If you do not want to be photographed, please inform a staff person or the photographer. A sticker will be provided to help identify you so that we can avoid capturing your image.

The Bay Guardian

2025-02-18T10:34:00.000-08:00

SFPL has excellent online access to local news sources that include full runs of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. Another valuable resource for local news research is the Bay Guardian, the SF-based alt-weekly that was published from 1966-2014.

A different, earlier usage of "click" (click on a flashlight)

The Library has the full run of the SFBG in microformat...

... (remainder of the run is on microfiche in a different but co-located cabinet) but perhaps the best way to experience the issues currently is to view via the Internet Archive (IA). On IA, the issues are in glorious color and one can also keyword search the content. One caveat (other than the precarious situation with IA) is that this resource is not listed in Periodical Finder, at least not in a conventional way. However, links are available in the catalog records for the Bay Guardian microformat as seen here:

The first issue is available!

The last issue is, too!

But some issues have yet to be uploaded:

Note: there is some redundancy in uploads but there is an advantage to this...

Search interface on Internet Archive - able to search text content of issues:

Also able to search metadata (note: content uploaded by source "folio" are the ones that seem to have the (very selective) metadata, so these searches will be less than comprehensive in terms of the publication run).

If you need any assistance with this resource, please contact us at the Magazines and Newspapers Center, we'd be glad to help. In the meantime, we heartily recommend browsing the timeless advice found in the "Ask Isadora" column - so much easier to find them with the text search - and also on theme!