The photographs are in color. That is where the story begins, and it is not a small thing. When Gordon Parks traveled to Mobile and Shady Grove, Alabama, in the summer of 1956 on assignment for Life magazine, he brought a handheld twist-lens Rokkeiflex camera and made the deliberate choice to shoot in color. The resulting images, lush and square and composed with extraordinary care, documented the daily lives of the Thorton, Causey and Tanner families under Jim Crow with a warmth and specificity that transformed documentary photography into something closer to portraiture of the fullest human kind.
