Mourners
1956, printed later
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
silver dye bleach print
Dimensions
image: 49.5 × 32.1 cm (19 1/2 × 12 5/8 in.) sheet: 50.8 × 33.3 cm (20 × 13 1/8 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Accession Number
2016.117.197
Art Historical Context
Gordon Parks' *Mourners* (1956, printed later) is a powerful silver dye bleach print that captures profound human emotion amid mid-20th-century America. Measuring 49.5 × 32.1 cm, this photograph from the Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks) at the National Gallery of Art Parks' role as a pioneering African American photojournalist. Working for magazines like *Life*, Parks documented the dignity and struggles of Black life during the Jim Crow era, turning his lens on intimate moments that revealed broader social truths. The silver dye bleach—also known as Cibachrome or Ilfochrome—lends the i...
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...