Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957

Editor: Sarah Hermanson Meister, ed., with texts by Nicole Fleetwood and Bryan Stevenson

When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade, the first African American to hold this position. Parks embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in color.