Annotated Bib #2 Serah Lee

One of the things that Gordon Parkers is known for is the variety in his photography. Parkers’ fifty pictures in Charles Johnson’s The Photographs of Gordon Parks: The Library of Congress really shows his diversity, like races, themes, topics, and so on. What I recognize is that he really tries to show what is going on in life. For example, he takes a picture of Harlem, just Harlem. He takes a photo of an advertisement of a gospel singer wanted to show musical spirit in Harlem, two random kids standing facing the opposite side of the camera, a very young newsboy, and so on. He also has a photo of fishermen catching mackerels and fishermen watering fish with brine water. He shows how a bigger boat tows a smaller boat, and also there is a picture of a bunch of hats shown through the glass wall of the hat store. His pictures are natural and show things that he sees around him.

And the photo I am looking at is a picture of a family. I see a room in the woman holding a baby, sitting on a bed, in a place where it looks like a bedroom with a big make-up mirror, a curtain, and wallpaper.  

I see that they are not all sitting together.

There are dining table chair looking chairs.

A woman near a calendar is controlling her facial expression and her body posture, sitting straight and her arms put properly.

I see pipes on the walls.

I see a light on the ceiling in the bedroom.

As Parkers’ style, he took a picture of a family in a daily setting, not pretending or posing at a studio, but at home(I assume seeing a bedroom and a kitchen). The photo shows what women do in the house, chitchatting perhaps in one side, taking care of a baby on the other, or hanging around here and there. I see they all were doing their own things, but they were informed by Parkers that they were going to be photographed. They kind of stopped whatever they were doing and sort of stayed not to be blurred in the photo.

I assume that the houses in 1943 were built with pipes sticking outside of the wall. I also assume that houses had lights on the ceiling at home, unlike American homes nowadays do not hang lights when they build a house but use different lamps.