Malcolm X Holding up Black Muslim Newspaper, Harlem, New York

Gordon Parks

1912–2006

Malcolm X Holding up Black Muslim Newspaper, Harlem, New York, 1963

Where object was made: Harlem, New York, New York, United States

Material/technique: gelatin silver print

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 38.7 x 48.9 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 15 1/4 x 19 1/4 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 20 x 25 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Friends of the Art Museum

Accession number: 1993.0044

Not on display

Add to portfolio

If you wish to reproduce this image, please submit an image request

Images

Label texts

Brosseau Center for Learning: In Conversation with the 2016 KU Common Book

“Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality.” ("Between the World and Me," p. 36)

Exhibition Label: "Intersection of Race and Gender," Mar-1999, Douglas Steward Gordon Parks's "Malcolm X Selling Newspapers" and Marion Palfi's "A New Arrival for 'Acculturation and Relocation'" present gender in two different public contexts. In Parks's photograph, Malcolm X boldly holds up a newspaper reporting political strife. His firm grip on the paper indicates his control of the situation, and his confident, side-long gaze suggests that he is fully awareof why the word "justice" has been placed in quotation marks in the newspaper headline. Malcolm X exudes the self-assurance of a man who believes that he belongs in the public sphere and that he can enact social change there. On the other hand, Marion Palfi's photograph features a young woman whose downcast expression testifies to her alienation. While Malcolm X defiantly raises his right hand, thrusting political issues toward the viewer, Palfi's figure looks dejected, and she draws her arms close to her body. Perhaps the blanket that she clutches serves as a double reminder of domestic life and traditional tribal culture. Certainly the row of identical, closed lockers forms a drab backdrop for this unhappy "new arrival," signifying the loss of her culture and her current anonymity. Taken together, Parks's and Palfi's photographs repeat the now threadbare cliché that women are ineffective in the masculine public sphere. However, Parks's work progressively depicts a black individual as empowered and confident, while Palfi's represents the confrontation between Euro-American and Native American cultures as Native disempowerment. Archive Label: Gordon Parks has enjoyed a long and successful career as an artist, working in poetry, fiction, autobiography, film, and ballet as well as in the medium for which he is best known, photography. During the 1940s he made photographs for the Farm Security Administration and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, projects that documented American life during that time. He joined the staff of Life magazine in 1949 as its first African-American photographer, working in France, the United States, and Brazil. He retired from Life in the early 1970s and now makes film, writes, paints, and composes music, in addition to his photography.