The contact sheets show Parks making multiple exposures of each chosen vignette, refining the spatial relationships until the gestures coalesced. Most of these photographs document lingering life on stoops and outside storefronts: watching the world go by, yawning, arguing, in front of the Indian herb store or the grocer advertising neck bones. Pedestrians trudge in the rain under a movie marquee announcing Dealers in Crime and Hoodlum Empire, while lines of abandoned shoes lie on the sidewalk. What’s amazing is that many of Parks’ street scenes from Harlem exhibit some of these same kind of moments, albeit drawn from everyday life. The contact sheets show Parks experimenting with poses and angles, looking for just the right range of quietly surreal tension and contrast. A man peers out from under a manhole cover in the middle of the street with an uncertain, fugitive look in his eye, another works turntables amid a light blub covered underground retreat (complete with superimposed city lights above), and various suited men dash with suitcases on darkened sidewalks. The images Parks made for Invisible Man have a definite sense of the staged or the imagined. The result is a show that smoothly moves back and forth between fact and fiction, between real life and literature, all within the context of Parks’ compositional eye. The exhibit dives deep into important single images from the project and the related contact sheets that show Parks’ artistic process, and then pairs them with more documentary-style street photographs made by Parks in Harlem a few years earlier (again with the associated contact sheets). Curated by the artist Glenn Ligon, it primarily examines the images Parks made in 1952 to illustrate some of the scenes from Ralph Ellison’s ground-breaking book Invisible Man. Comments/Context: Of all the exhibits dedicated to the work of Gordon Parks on view in the city right now (and there are several), this small show is my favorite.
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