Resonance Man

As a social documentarian, Gordon Parks enjoys a well-deserved reputation. The photographer, now 88, recorded a remarkable array of ordinary and extraordinary lives throughout his distinguished career, including his long tenure (1948 to 1970) as a staff photographer for Life magazine.

Nothing, however, speaks more eloquently of an artist’s significance than an encounter with a work made decades ago that still resonates dramatically with the present day. One such photograph comes early on in “Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks,” the large and absorbing retrospective exhibition now at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park. Just around the corner from the show’s entrance, a work from 1942, the year the former railroad worker moved from Chicago to Washington, D.C., to pursue his growing interest in photographic storytelling, steps forward to clarify some of what has been at stake in the just-concluded presidential campaign.

“Negro Woman in Her Bedroom, Washington (Southwest Section), D.C.” displays its ample subject in profile seated on a neatly made bed, with her feet planted firmly and her arms stretched out at her sides. It takes a moment to realize that we are not looking at the woman directly. Instead, her image is being reflected in a circular mirror, whose close-up shape echoes against a second round mirror in the distance, set atop a dressing table at the back of the room.

Parks has used his camera to focus our direct gaze on the relationship between two optical objects found in the woman’s modestly appointed bedroom. First is the mirror, in which a poor black woman daily sees herself reflected. Second is a photograph, an official portrait of the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that she has chosen to hang on the wall right next to and slightly above the mirror. It’s easy to imagine the anonymous woman’s common activity of looking in the mirror to fix her hair or adjust her clothing and seeing Roosevelt out of the corner of her eye.

Parks’ black and white photograph is like a poignant modern memory of Baroque-era play between gods and mortals in classical mythology. In 1942 there’s, of course, the matter of the war abroad, and of the fate of nations in a ferocious battle between good and evil. But there’s also an epic struggle rooted in a similar dichotomy at home--a struggle about poverty, equity and racism.

Parks, like the woman in the picture, must have had a special consciousness of his own relationship to Roosevelt. It was Roosevelt who started the documentary photography program for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1935, a legendary project that had two goals. One was to record for posterity the devastation wrought by the Great Depression. The other was to create a bank of images (more than 60,000 were made) reflecting poverty and the plight of the needy that could help influence public opinion in the administration’s gargantuan task of implementing the New Deal. Parks, along with Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and others, became an FSA photographer.

When you consider “Negro Woman in Her Bedroom” as a social document, you see one eloquently considered aspect of a situation that was critically important nearly 60 years ago. Now that the photograph is a historical document as well, however, it also gives texture and meaning to the present. Central to Tuesday’s contest in the election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush was their sharp philosophical disagreement about the legacy of the New Deal and federalism. Parks’ photograph shows what’s at stake on the day-to-day level of human existence, and it reveals some roots of the ongoing debate.

The picture was made around the same time as the one that is perhaps Parks’ most famous image. He posed Ella Watson, a bespectacled black charwoman working in a federal office, alone before an American flag with a broom at her side. The composition collapsed into one haunting figure the famous dour couple with a pitchfork in “American Gothic,” Grant Woods’ pinched ode to the beleaguered dignity of farm life. Parks was just 30, yet both of these photographs demonstrate a sophisticated formal methodology for making sense of complex social subject matter.

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The retrospective, organized by Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, shows Parks’ aesthetic strategy to be distinctly Modernist. His photographs tend to be frontal, with the subject aligned in harmony with the picture plane. Flat shapes, especially basic ones like circles, squares, ovals and triangles, get emphasized. Pictorial space is mostly shallow, while illusions of deep space are often created through cleverly crafted surface pattern. Diagonal compositions sometimes add an element of geometric counterpoint.

Still, a sense that the picture’s elements have been organized on a grid usually remains strong. One powerful result is pictures characterized by stark visual clarity. The random, disjointed and amorphous complexities of life suddenly snap into lucid, coherent order. For recalcitrant social problems like poverty and racism, this persuasive effect is bracing.

Parks’ technique also yields a crisp graphic quality, which fits like a glove with the requirements of the magazine pages in which so many of his photographs first appeared. Whether the image records the brutality of crime across America or the haute couture fantasies of Paris fashions--the shock of blood running in the streets or of ball gowns as cornucopias overflowing with ripened female abundance--these pictures look just great on the page.

For the show, which features more than 200 photographs, this important aspect of Parks’ work is acknowledged through numerous display cases in which magazine layouts correspond to framed pictures hanging on nearby walls. Parks is also a well-known writer, and examples of his poetry appear on wall panels throughout the galleries, while books are displayed in several vitrines. Screenings of his movies, including “The Learning Tree” (1969) and “Shaft” (1971), are scheduled for weekend of Nov. 17.

If there’s a weakness to the show, it’s in the selection of color photographs on view. The first color picture is 1945’s monochromatic “Table of Snow,” in which a cold blue light infuses the wintry scene; but Parks didn’t work in color in earnest until the late 1950s. The exhibition’s excellent catalog includes a variety of first-rate color examples that mostly surpass the ones inexplicably chosen for the gallery walls. There, color tends to diffuse the graphic punch and lessen the gravity characteristic of Parks’ best work.

The exception, interestingly, is in the show’s most recent work. Since the early 1990s, the octogenarian artist has mostly been making photographic abstractions using an ink jet printer and watercolor paper. The absorbent paper emphasizes the atmospheric potential of transparent colored inks. His nature subjects--shells, clouds, leaves, mist, petals--seem to dissolve, like a sugar cube in warm water. The Modernist technique of the documentary photographs remains, but here it’s suffused in lovely poetic mood.

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* California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, (213) 744-2060, through Dec. 30. Closed Mondays.

* “Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks,” a documentary on Parks and the exhibition will be seen on HBO at 9 p.m. Nov. 30