Gordon Parks: The South in Color By Brian Byrd

Brian Byrd is a freelance photographer with over two decades of experience using communication to drive social change. He serves on the boards of the Overseas Press Club of America and WITNESS, a global human rights organization founded by Peter Gabriel.

My grandfather was a sharecropper in Columbia, South Carolina. He worked land he would never own, under laws designed to ensure he never could. Sharecropping was, by design, a system of perpetual debt, a post-emancipation architecture of economic bondage that kept Black families tethered to white landowners with no realistic path to independence. It was segregation’s economic twin: one system controlled where Black Americans could go, the other controlled what they could accumulate. I know this not from stories alone, but from photographs - faded, creased, black and white photographs that are among the few material artifacts my family carries from that era. They are precious to me. They are also, in some essential way, incomplete.

That incompleteness is not accidental. It is structural. When Americans are taught Black history, whether in classrooms, documentaries, or museum exhibitions, the visual archive we are handed is almost uniformly monochromatic. The marches, the lunch counters, the fire hoses, the faces: all rendered in grayscale. And over time, something insidious happens. That visual vocabulary quietly shapes how we feel about the past. Historical black and white photography, by its very nature, signals distance. It tells the eye: this is history. It signals: this was another time and another world. And in doing so, it creates an inadvertent emotional buffer between the subject captured and the viewer receiving them. The suffering becomes abstract. The humanity, harder to hold.

Gordon Parks: The South in Color, now on view at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta through June 13, dismantles that buffer image by image, frame by frame.

The exhibition, organized in partnership with The Gordon Parks Foundation, brings together more than thirty photographs from Parks’ landmark Segregation Story series, images he made in and around Mobile, Alabama in the summer of 1956, on assignment for Life magazine. The occasion marks two significant anniversaries: the 70th anniversary of that original publication, and the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Gordon Parks Foundation. But the timing of the exhibition feels urgent in ways that go beyond commemoration.

To understand what Parks was walking into, and what he was up against, it helps to remember what 1956 Alabama actually was. The Supreme Court had ruled school segregation unconstitutional just two years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, but the ruling had done almost nothing to alter daily life in the Deep South, where Jim Crow law governed every public interaction with a specificity that now reads as bureaucratic sadism. The terror, in other words, was not ambient. It was organized and encoded into the architecture of daily life, enforced by courts, police, and the constant threat of private violence.

Black residents of Mobile could not eat at most restaurants, could not try on clothes before purchasing them in white-owned stores, could not sit in the main section of a movie theater. They were required, by force of law, to endure their own diminishment in public, dozens of times a day through separate drinking fountains, separate waiting rooms, separate entrances, separate schools, separate churches. When Parks arrived in Alabama, Emmett Till had been murdered in Mississippi just twelve months prior, his killers acquitted by an all-white jury in sixty-seven minutes.

Parks once said of his work, “I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.” Into this world, he arrived with a handheld, twin-lens Rolleiflex camera and made a deliberate choice: he would shoot in color. He photographed the daily lives of the Thornton family and their extended relatives (the Causeys, the Tanners) with the careful compositional attention of an artist who understood that the way you frame a life is itself an argument about its value. The result is a body of work that is lush, square-format, and formally exquisite. Children in bright dresses. A woman at a drinking fountain. Faces turned toward the camera with a dignity that the law was then actively working to deny.

The exhibition is curated by Dawoud Bey, a MacArthur Fellow and considered one of the most consequential photographers working today. Bey’s curation grows directly from his 2022 essay The South in Color, included in the expanded edition of Gordon Parks: Segregation Story, in which he argues that these photographs deserve to be evaluated not only for the moral courage of their mission, but for the quality of their making. Parks’ deliberate choices of tool, material, and sensibility, Bey writes, lend the Black Southern presence, often under siege, a sense of lives fully and expressively lived.

That phrase, fully and expressively lived, is the key that unlocks the entire exhibition. Because here is what color does that black and white cannot: it keeps you in the present tense.

When you stand before a black and white photograph of a Black child in the Jim Crow South, your brain, conditioned by decades of visual training, processes it as artifact. It is evidence of the past, or something to be studied and mourned. But when that same child appears in color, in the warm greens, reds and dusty golds of an Alabama summer, the image does something different to your nervous system. It refuses distance. It says: this person was a real human, living in the same world you inhabit. The sky above them was the same blue sky. The heat they felt was the same we’ve all felt during summer.

This is not a small thing. The visual grammar of segregation was itself a tool of dehumanization and the camera was not exempt from its logic. The documentary photographs most Americans associate with the civil rights era were made, overwhelmingly, in black and white. Some of that was practical: black and white film was cheaper, faster, more reliable in difficult conditions. But the effect, accumulated over generations of repetition, has been to aestheticize Black suffering into a kind of monumental abstraction. The images are powerful. They are also, paradoxically, easier to absorb than they should be, because their visual register tells us, below the threshold of conscious thought, that we are looking at the past. That it is over. That we are safe from it.

Parks understood this. His decision to shoot the Segregation Story series in color was not incidental, it was the point. He had spent years as the first Black staff photographer at Life, covering both fashion and photojournalism with equal mastery, and he knew precisely what each visual register communicated to an audience. Color was the language of the present, of aspiration, the visual idiom of Life magazine essays about American abundance. Deploying it in the service of documenting American apartheid was a radical act of reframing: if the suffering of Black Americans could be rendered in the same visual language as the American Dream, then perhaps Americans might be forced to reckon with the contradiction.

The exhibition includes some of Parks’ most recognized images — among them At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 — alongside many not previously shown at the gallery. The opening reception on April 2 featured an extraordinary moment: Ms. Cora Taylor, the woman photographed at that very drinking fountain nearly seven decades ago, was present in the gallery. To stand in a room where a living witness meets her own image, rendered in the full chromatic truth of that summer afternoon, is to understand something about what color photography makes possible that no amount of critical theory can fully articulate. Segregation tried to make Black people invisible, interchangeable, abstract. Color film, in Parks’ hands, made them undeniably and irreducibly present.

The exhibition also premieres a limited-edition portfolio, The South in Color, published by The Gordon Parks Foundation in an edition of 25 with 5 Artist’s Proofs. The publication comprises ten photographs that center on Parks’ attention to children. It is the right focal point. Children anchor many of the series’ most powerful images precisely because their presence makes the moral obscenity of segregation undeniable. These were children who would grow up navigating a world that had pre-assigned their worth, pre-determined their access, pre-arranged their humiliation. A child in living color, playing and existing, and doing so under a system designed to crush them is an image that cannot be filed away as history.

My family photographs from the Jim Crow era are still black and white. My grandfather’s face, his hands, the land he sharecropped, all rendered in tones that the decades have further drained of warmth. I cannot change that. But to walk through this exhibition is to understand, perhaps for the first time, what we lost as a nation. Every time we accepted the grayscale as the default visual register for Black suffering, we lose proximity to the moment captured. We lose the insistence color demands of us: the insistence of humanity in full.

Segregation was a system built on the premise that some lives were less vivid than others. Gordon Parks used a color camera to prove otherwise.

Robert Doisneau. Instants Donnés concluded its run on October 19, 2025, at the Musée Maillol (59-61, rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris). The exhibition represents a collaborative effort between Tempora, the Atelier Doisneau, and the Musée Maillol.