If Dawoud Bey’s call is to examine the Black present and past, his latest answer to that call can be found off Peachtree Road, in Atlanta. With over forty images from Gordon Parks’ Segregation Story series, Bey fills the sunlit space at Jackson Fine Art with intimacy that includes palpable dignity and power in every scene Parks captured. A tailored, convicted approach, Bey, the curator of the show, sees the South through Parks’ eyes.
When Parks went to Alabama in 1956, the Kansas native was afraid for his life.[1] Navigating the state with the guidance of a local, Sam Yette, Parks found himself feeling harassed, heckled, and hunted in what he called “the motherland of racism.”Nevertheless, he captured what he sought: to elucidate a different perspective of what it meant to be Black and Southern in a community suffocated by the unmoving grip of Jim Crow. His task was to present an alternative view in the midst of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, a resistance not with picket signs or with the dollar, but with determination, excellence, and the pursuit of normalcy despite the limitations faced.
