Photographer Gordon Parks' religious images displayed in DC exhibition

WASHINGTON (RNS) — A new exhibition of the work of Gordon Parks, a photographer renowned for documenting African American life, turns its focus on Parks’ exploration of Black religion and spirituality.

“Although Gordon Parks’s personal religious beliefs vacillated across his lifetime, he applied a working knowledge of Black religious culture with a commitment to humanism as an approach to documentary photography and photojournalism,” reads the introductory wall text for “Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Religious Life” at Howard University in Washington.

The exhibition, which runs through Dec. 1, is a collaboration between the Gordon Parks Foundation and Howard, whose Moorland-Spingarn Research Center acquired a collection of 244 of Parks’ photos from the foundation in 2022.

The more than 40 photos and artifacts on display at Howard highlight the life and leaders of the Black church, the Nation of Islam and broader Black spirituality over the course of Parks’ half-century of work as a photographer, in which he became a chronicler first of Black working people and street life and later of the Civil Rights Movement. Parks, who died in 2006 at age 93, also made his mark as a filmmaker, musician and writer.

The exhibition also includes images of Watson, a member of a Spiritualist church in Washington, receiving an anointment in one and, in the other, caring for children in view of a home shrine that features saintly figures and a Bible.

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