Mother and Children, Shady Grove, Alabama
1956, printed later
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
silver dye bleach print
Dimensions
image: 49.9 × 49.5 cm (19 5/8 × 19 1/2 in.) sheet: 51.1 × 50.8 cm (20 1/8 × 20 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Accession Number
2016.117.196
Art Historical Context
Gordon Parks's *Mother and Children, Sh Grove, Alabama* (1956, printed later) captures a poignant of everyday resilience amid the harsh realities of segregation-era America. Shot in rural Alabama, this silver dye bleach print—known for its rich, stable colors and sharp detail—depicts a Black mother tenderly cradling her children, evoking quiet strength in the face of poverty and discrimination. Parks, a trailblazing African American photographer filmmaker, used his lens to humanize the struggles of sharecroppers and families in the Jim Crow South, drawing from his seminal 1956 Life magazine es...
About the Artist
Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks (1912–2006), born the youngest of fifteen children to a Kansas tenant farmer and his wife in segregated Fort Scott, overcame a childhood marked by poverty, racism, and tragedy—including his mother's death at age fourteen—to become one of America's most influential chroniclers of Black life. Entirely self-taught after purchasing his first camera in 1937, inspired by Farm Security Admin...