American Gothic

“I had done some fashion work in St. Paul and I had principally gone to Chicago to shoot fashion, but I found myself doing more and more work on the south side, the poverty stricken areas where the blacks lived. That is what got me a Rosenwald Fellowship, the first one ever given in photography. At the time, Jack Delano was in Chicago and he encouraged me to come to the Farm Security Administration.

I wanted to work at the FSA because they were doing what I wanted to do – exposing poverty in America- and along with poverty I wanted to expose racism in America, so I sort of fit right into the grove.

“Roy Stryker [head of FSA] didn’t want to take me on at first because of the racism that was in Washington in 1942. The whole laboratory was from the south and Roy felt that I was going to have a hard time. But the Julius Rosenwald people encourage him and told him that I had to take care of myself. When FSA broke up, I was the only photographer on the staff that the lab gave a party for. Evidently, they liked what I’d done. I broke down racism through hard work.

“The people who were suffering were the important ones, and I a sense, we were just sent to listen to what they had to say, what they wanted to show us. It was our problem to get their message out to the world.”

“I more or less directed my camera toward poverty and racism in Washington, D.C. I did a lot of picture s of black people and I followed a charwoman around. By just being with her I was able to enter all areas of the community to see black people at their jobs and the inhumanity they suffered. And that’s what I was doing there – the preparation for my future work.” pages 14-16

Harlem

“I arrived in Washington in 1942 to work alongside the very best documentary photographers – a goal that had kept haunting me after I saw their pictures of those impoverished migrant workers. Four years had gone by since then. I knew very little about Washington, other than that beneath its gleaming monuments and gravestones lay men with famous gleaming monuments and gravelstones lay men with famous names in American history. Sensing my ignorance, Stryker sent me out to get acquainted with the rituals of the nation’s capital. I went with enthusiasm. The sky was without clouds; the entire universe seemed to greet me with promise.

“But soon my contentment began crumbling. In this radiant, historic place, racism was rampant. White restaurants shooed me to the back door white theater refused me. The tone of white clerks at Julius Garfinckel’s department store riled me. Clothing I had hoped to buy there went unbought. They didn’t have my size – no matter what I wanted. Washington had turned ugly. I hurried back to Stryker. My face told him everything. Pulling on his coat to leave, he asked, “Well how did it go?”

“Mississippi couldn’t have been much worse. What’s to do about i

"American Gothic," considered to be Parks's signature image, was taken in Washington, D.C., in 1942, during the photographer's fellowship with the Farm Security Administration, a government agency set up by President Roosevelt to aid farmers in despair. "It's the first professional image I ever made," Parks says, "created on my first day in Washington." Roy Stryker, who led the FSA's very best documentary photographers—Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, etc.—told Parks to go out and get acquainted with the city. Parks was amazed by the amount of bigotry and discrimination he encountered on his very first day. "White restaurants made me enter through the back door, white theaters wouldn't even let me in the door, and as the day went