Gordon Parks American Gothic (1942) Term Paper

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Accordingly, a retelling of their interaction by Brookman (2004) is eye-opening. Here, Brookman remarks that in their first meeting, Watson essentially told Parks her life story. Brookman reports that "in August 1942 Parks listened as Watson told her story. 'She had struggled alone after her mother had died and her father had been killed by a lynch mob,' he recalls. 'She had gone through high school, married and become pregnant. Her husband was accidentally shot to death two days before the daughter was born. By the time the daughter was eighteen she had given birth to two illegitimate children, dying two weeks after the second child's birth. What's more, the first child had been stricken with paralysis a year before its mother died. Now this woman was bringing up these grandchildren on a salary hardly suitable for one person.' (p. 1)

As Parks listened to her tell this story, he recognized the imperative to find a way to reiterate this story to many others through a set of images. Therefore, Watson would become a muse for Parks as he ventured to identify the visual core of African-American suffering. The experience for the African-American woman in particular, as a mother and grandmother struggling against the twin prejudices of racism and sexism, are captured in the FSA series.

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But there is another level of importance and emotiveness where the image is concerned. This relates to the strength that its subject exudes. As Parks would find in his own experiences, and as he would probe with his photography and through the other modes of expression which he toyed with over a long and illustrious career, there is a great strength and pride which are to be admired in those like Ella Watson. It the American Gothic photograph, we are shown a woman who is almost defiantly proud to stand before the American flag. She appears ready to support the indictment of the system that Parks intends to make.

And ultimately, it is thus that the photograph is a tremendously successful image, shocking for its brazen statement on racial realities in a time when this discourse was treated with particular hostility and universal in its assertion of human dignity under the thumb of inhumane oppression. For Parks, such photographs would be instrumental in telling the psychological story of blacks in America.

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