Leslie Parks Bailey is chopping as she talks about her father, noted American photographer Gordon Parks.
It’s the Friday before his latest exhibit, “The South in Color,” opens at Jackson Fine Art, and Parks Bailey is at work in an Atlanta kitchen, prepping lunch. She’s a personal chef. Four days a week, two and a half hours a day, she cooks. So, as we move through a conversation that spans family memory, historical images, lasting legacy, and the state of American civic discourse, her knife keeps moving. Slicing. Stripping. The rhythm of a woman who uses her hands to nourish people, in the same way her father used his eye to nourish something in all of us, too.
“It makes it more touchable,” Parks Bailey says of the color photographs at the center of “The South in Color.” “More real. Because we do live in color, right? So it’s not so distant.”
Parks Bailey will be at the exhibit’s opening reception Thursday evening, April 2, among longtime friends and collectors who love her father’s work, too. Organized in partnership with The Gordon Parks Foundation, “The South in Color” brings more than forty photographs from Parks’s landmark 1956 “Segregation Story” series to Atlanta, in honor of the foundation’s 20th anniversary and the series’s 70th. Shot in the summer of 1956 in and around Mobile, Alabama, for Life magazine, the exhibition’s images document the daily lives of the Thornton family and their relatives, the Causeys and Tanners, through a novel choice, at the time — color film. Parks shot the series on a handheld twin-lens Rolleiflex camera. The resulting square-format images are lush, intimate, and composed with the understanding that how you show people is itself a political act.
How color changes everything
Many people’s mental images of the American Civil Rights era are in black and white. The past flattened into stark contrast. Color complicates that. It insists on the fullness of a life. And for Parks Bailey, encountering these photographs as an adult meant confronting a side of her father’s work that felt genuinely new. The images included in the exhibition were among those rediscovered by the Parks Foundation in 2011.
“Seeing the photographs in color, they really kind of popped at me in a different way,” Parks Bailey says. “I’ve seen his fashion photos in color, but this … it made the work feel less distant. Less like history and more like something happening right now.”
Parks knew exactly what he was doing. Curator Dawoud Bey, the acclaimed American photographer and MacArthur Fellow who curated “The South in Color” for the Parks Foundation, explores this in his title essay from the 2022 expanded edition of “Gordon Parks: Segregation Story,” a reexamination of the original Life photo essay that deepened both its historical and artistic context. Bey wrote that Parks’s deliberate choices of tool, material, and sensibility lend the Black Southern presence “a sense of lives fully and expressively lived.” The exhibition is built around the idea that these photographs should be viewed not only as documents of injustice, but as works of extraordinary artistic intention.
“It’s important for collectors to understand that beyond putting a piece of Gordon Parks’s work on their wall, it’s important to remember history. Our history.”
Leslie Parks Bailey
Growing up Gordon Parks’s daughter
Parks Bailey was not yet born when her father traveled to Alabama in the summer of 1956. She grew up knowing him less through his work than through the way the world responded to him.
“We couldn’t make it down the street without someone stopping him,” she says. “I knew that he was different. He was different than other dads.”
Her parents separated when she was young, and visits to her father were occasional, including once to the set of “Shaft,” which he directed in 1971. Her mother, Elizabeth Campbell, a model who was among the first Black women signed to the Eileen Ford agency, was photographed alongside a young Leslie by Slim Aarons, the American photographer celebrated for his images of socialites and jet-setters. It was a world of achievement and visibility. But her father’s Civil Rights work existed at some remove from the life she was living.
“My family wasn’t struggling,” she says. “I went to private school. I didn’t really understand.”
That understanding came later, and it is still coming. Parks documented American life for more than two decades, from his early work with the Farm Security Administration through his long tenure as a staff photographer at Life, but he never sat his youngest daughter down and walked her through any of it. “It was just kind of an understanding,” she says, “that he did something important.”
What the photographs hold
When asked which images from “The South in Color” stop her cold, Parks Bailey describes a photograph of young Black girls standing at a fence, watching white children play on the other side.
“Everybody wants to be included,” she says, her chopping pausing for a moment. “But knowing that you can’t cross that fence. Knowing that you will get in trouble. Knowing that you can lose your life at such a young age … that’s crazy.”
She connects it immediately to the present. Her two sons are in their mid- to late twenties. She worries about them moving through the world as young Black men. She is not sure the dial has moved so much from when her father was their age, a notion that lends additional meaning to the work being showcased this spring by the Parks Foundation and Jackson Fine Art.
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“It’s important to understand what’s happening now,” Parks Bailey says. “We’re still there. It’s important for young people to see. It’s important for collectors to understand that beyond putting a piece of Gordon Parks’s work on their wall, it’s important to remember history. Our history.”
Atlanta, grief, and coming home to the work
The opening of “The South in Color” arrives at a particularly layered moment for Parks Bailey. She is the widow of Radcliffe Bailey, the mixed-media artist whose large-scale work drew deeply from African diaspora history and whose career was closely intertwined with Atlanta’s arts community. She moved down South to Atlanta from New York for him — and she is still here, finding her footing in a place where his absence is ever present.
“It’s part of my healing,” she says. “Re-entering the art world a little bit. Without Radcliffe. He would have been at the show. He would have done whatever he could to support it.”
She pauses. “I wish that Radcliffe could be here. He never met my father. And I know he always wanted to.”
In his autobiographies, Gordon Parks wrote about hope as something he reached for repeatedly, in his work and in life. His daughter carries that same reach forward, from a kitchen in Georgia, knife in hand, talking about photographs taken almost twenty years before she was born.
“I’m happy that his voice is still here,” she says, “to say these things for us. And for the world.”
“Gordon Parks: The South in Color” opens Thursday, April 2, with a public reception from 6 to 8 p.m. at Jackson Fine Art. The exhibition runs through June 13.
