Gordon Parks: Pastor E. F. Ledbetter and the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, 1953

In 1953, Gordon Parks returned to Chicago on assignment for Life magazine with the charge of photographing the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church for a series on American religious life. After the success of his recent work for Life, Parks approached the Near West Side church with a decisive eye toward composing compelling images that conveyed simultaneously the universal humanity and the local specificity of the religious community. This would be the first assignment for which he was on record as writer as well as photographer. The photographs he took and the essay he wrote were never published by Life, yet as this volume demonstrates, Parks’s visual and textual representation of Black religious life powerfully documents the dynamism of a community shaped by the Great Migration and Chicago’s industrial landscape. Parks embarked on a significant chapter of his aesthetic and conceptual development through his engagement with the pastor, the Reverend Ernest F. Ledbetter, Sr., and the members of his church. This publication features more than sixty-five previously unpublished photographs and contact sheets, complemented by Parks’s unpublished manuscript. Scholarly essays provide insight and contextual analysis in art history, cultural geography, Black religious studies, and creative writing. Edited by Melanee C. Harvey, this volume includes contributions by Harvey, Abby R. Eron, Kymberly Pinder, J.T. Roane, Kera Street, and Darlene R. Taylor. The son and grandson of Reverend Ledbetter, Reverend Ernest F. Ledbetter, Jr., and Reverend Ernest F. Ledbetter III, penned an insightful reflection on the life of the senior Reverend Ledbetter that animates a section of ephemeral material from the private collection of the Ledbetter family. The publication concludes with a section of brief essays by Melanee Harvey and Abby R. Eron that situate Gordon Parks in the broader history of photography housed in collections at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.