Gordon Parks: I Use My Camera as a Weapon

Feel free to visit the Contemporary Museum Wrocław and savour the exhibitions “Gordon Parks: I Use My Camera as a Weapon”. 

• Sneak preview: 2nd June (Friday), 6 pm, free admission
• The preview will be celebrated with a live show from the STAN BRECKENRIDGE TRIO at the Museum’s rooftop. Stan Breckenridge (vocal, piano) is going to perform with Tolek Lisiecki (double bass) and Wiesiek Jamioł (drums) from the Jazz Band Ball Orchestra from Kraków. The programme for the evening brings a selection of jazz and American evergreens. 

Curators: Joanna Kinowska, Paweł Bąkowski

The title of the exhibition “Gordon Parks: I Use My Camera as a Weapon” is inspired by a quotation from his première and seminal book “A Choice of Weapons”. The title is the key to his life philosophy and it has to do with choosing your tools precisely in order to reach your goals. It also refers to a form of activism and the struggle for social equality.

What was he likes as a photographer? How did he select his subjects? What was his approach when photographing people and how did he treat his subjects? The exhibition features a selection of eighty photographs by Parks. Some of them are iconic, some are lesser known.  As a photographer, he was first of all a humanist, a concerned human being. “I had chosen my camera as a tool of social consciousness. Common sense told me I had to have a sufficient understanding of what was right or wrong, otherwise that camera could eventually become my own enemy.”

Gordon Parks

The artist may be considered the true incarnation of the American myth of a self-made man. Born as the fifteenth child of Mr. and Mrs. Parks, he had to fight for survival, for jobs, for means to support his family, and finally he fought for African American civil rights. He lived 93 years and witnessed change, both on a macro and micro scale. Pathos is unavoidable when speaking about the first black photographer to be hired by such magazines as Life or Vogue. He was a writer, a poet, a composer and a Hollywood director. He published several memoirs, in which he stressed the importance of becoming a “somebody”: a rightful citizen of the United States, a respected man, but also respectful of other people.

Organisers: the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, the Gordon Parks Foundation

Sponsors: the Embassy of the United States of America to Poland, the Consulate General of the United States of America in Kraków.

Event details:
muzeumwspolczesne.pl

Photos

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