Gordon Parks and the Postwar American City

This conference will bring together scholars in the humanities and social sciences, photography curators, artists and filmmakers, and provide an opportunity to explore a towering and yet unsung intellectual figure, his unique photographic, cinematic and written perspectives, and an important period of social transformation in American life that reverberates into the current day.

More information on the conference will be available on the UIC Black studies website.

Gordon Parks is best remembered as one of the most prolific Black photographers of the 20th century and for his pioneering visual essays for Life magazine. This three-day 2025 conference brings together a dozen presenters to examine aspects of Parks’s work and how he addressed the radical transformation of American life taking place after World War II. In his photographic essays and films, Parks examined detective work and crime on the streets of American cities, ghettoization and poverty, the Nation of Islam and Black nationalism, the transition of civil rights protests to Black power militancy, and the various political and social aspirations animating Black life and American society more generally.

This conference will address the dearth of academic research on Parks. Although he published multiple memoirs and his work has been exhibited internationally for decades, we typically do not include Parks’ work in the pantheon of figures we examine in African American studies. It would be difficult to find a figure who so single-handedly documented and presented Black life to a mass audience at the time, and in a way that both cracked the glass ceiling for Black artists and challenged prevailing racist caricatures of Black life. Moreover, the sheer breadth of Parks’ work offers a uniquely expansive lens into the tectonic transformations taking shape in American life in the postwar period. His position as a photographer, journalist and filmmaker during this time likewise provides a unique perspective in relation to the scholars, activists and celebrities through whose experiences and ideas this period is typically interrogated. The resulting edited collection would be the first on the subject.

Chicago has a special place in Parks’ story. Born in Kansas in 1912, he spent his teen and early adult years in St. Paul, Minnesota, before moving to Chicago in 1940. Parks’ life would take a fortunate turn as he established his first portrait studio at the Southside Community Art Center and was recruited to the Farm Security Administration, where he developed his “camera as a weapon” approach to attacking social injustice.