Woman Dying, Chicago
1953
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
image: 32.7 × 47 cm (12 7/8 × 18 1/2 in.) sheet: 41 × 50.3 cm (16 1/8 × 19 13/16 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Accession Number
2016.117.181
Art Historical Context
Gordon Parks' *Woman Dying, Chicago*1953) is a poignant gelatin silver print capturing the harsh realities of urban poverty on Chicago's South Side. As a pioneering African American photographer and photojournalist, Parks documented the struggles of Black communities in the mid-20th century often for magazines like *Life*. This image, part of his broader exploration of segregation and hardship, evokes the dignity and despair amid post-World War II America's racial divides, highlighting systemic inequalities that fueled the emerging Civil Rights Movement. The gelatin silver print medium—Parks'...
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...