Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950
Philip Brookman illustrates how Parks’s early experiences at the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, and Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), as well as his close relationships with Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Roy Stryker, Charles White, and Richard Wright helped shape his groundbreaking style.
Brookman is the Consulting Curator in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. There, he has organized Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 and Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He also edited the book Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950, organized exhibitions on Eadweard Muybridge, Hank Willis Thomas, Taryn Simon, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, Jim Goldberg, Gilles Peress, Larry Sultan, and Danny Lyon. Brookman is a photographer, filmmaker, and writer, working extensively on issues of modern and contemporary art. In 2015 Steidl published his book Redlands, a work of fiction with photographs. He was selected to a museum fellow at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2020.