GORDON PARKS I AM YOU | PART 2

As a photographer, film director, composer, and writer, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was a multi-disciplinary artist whose art and advocacy for social justice still resonates in contemporary culture. In collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation, this second half of a two-part exhibition will focus on some of Parks’ most celebrated and iconic imagery; demonstrating his abilities as a photographer and journalist who moved just as seamlessly documenting everyday life and injustice facing African American families across the country, framing his subjects with compassion amidst unvarnished reality.

During the late 1940s through the 1960s, Parks produced some of his most renowned photographic essays on issues relating to civil rights. A stoic portrait of Red Jackson, from a 1948 series on the Harlem gang leader, reveals a man seemingly hemmed in by his options as he stares intently out a broken window; the darkness of the interior contrasts forebodingly with the light illuminating him from the street.

Opposite – Stokely Carmichael at SNCC Office, Atlanta, GA, 1967

Exhibition runs through to March 24th, 2018

Jack Shainman Gallery
524 West 24th Street
New York
10011 NY

www.jackshainman.com

FINK/WINOGRAND

Larry Fink and Garry Winogrand were both actively taking photographs in New York City in the 1970s. Winogrand primarily made photographs during the day of people on the city streets exemplified in the exhibition in a selection of work from his Women are Beautiful series that was made into a book. Larry Fink’s series Social Graces, also resulting in a book, consists of photographs depicting wealthy Manhattanites in the evenings at museum openings, balls, galas, and other such social events. In an effort to acknowledge the fact of social class in the United States, Fink juxtaposes the photographs of socialites with images of his working-class neighbors, the Sabatines, at their family gatherings and events in rural Pennsylvania. While their subject matter was different, their working style and resulting photographs are similar in that they employed what was called “the snapshot aesthetic.”

Opposite – Garry Winogrand (American, 1928 – 1984) – Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York 1969, from Women are Beautiful, c. 1970

Exhibition runs through to March 25th, 2018

Des Moines Art Center
4700 Grand Avenue
Des Moines
50312 IA

www.desmoinesartcenter.org

NICHOLAS NIXON – PERSISTENCE OF VISION

Based in Boston since the 1970s, Nicholas Nixon has captured the intimate details of family, relationships, and life as it unfolds in front of his camera. Using a large-format 8 x 10–inch camera and black-and-white film, he has photographed Boston’s changing landscape, porch life in the rural South, sick or dying people, and his own family. This exhibition surveys the artist’s prolific career and is organized around Nixon’s remarkable ongoing project The Brown Sisters, a series of group portraits of his wife Bebe and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi, and Laurie taken annually since 1975. The Brown Sisters will be presented in its entirety, and each portrait will be paired with other photographs made by Nixon in the same year, drawn from various bodies of work, including schools in and around Boston, people with AIDS, couples, and landscapes. Together these pictures underscore photography’s singular ability to capture the passage of time in incremental moments and are a testament to Nixon’s extraordinary persistence of vision.

Opposite – The Brown Sisters, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1975

Exhibition runs through to April 21st, 2018

The Institute of Contemporary Art
100 Northern Avenue
Boston
02210 MA

www.icaboston.org