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Image from Gordon Parks’s film Harlem Family, courtesy of the University of Indiana Libraries Moving Image Archive.

Films by Gordon Parks: Harlem Family and other shorts

Gordon Parks: Early Documentaries

  • Saturday, December 14, 2024
  • 2:00 p.m. – 3:45 p.m.
  • East Building Auditorium
  • Films
  • In-person
  • Registration Required
  • Drop-In Registration

Introduced by Philip Brookman, curator of the exhibition Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits from the Corcoran Collection, in person.

In June 1961, Life magazine published Parks’s seminal photo essay Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty, a profile of one family living in a favela on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Flavio is a portrait of that family’s eldest son and his daily struggle to survive (1964, 18 minutes). Followed by two other journalistic works: Diary of a Harlem Family (1968, 20 minutes) and The World of Piri Thomas (1968, 60 minutes). “Produced by NET (National Educational Television), these three films explore the lives of individuals separated by location — Brazil, Black Harlem, and Spanish Harlem — but are all unified by their impoverished environments and struggles to survive for a better future” — Anton Yu.

Special thanks to the University of Indiana Libraries Moving Image Archive.

Programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits from the Corcoran Collection.