Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror at Jack Shainman Gallery

Jack Shainman Gallery is presenting Voices in the Mirror, a Gordon Parks exhibition built around the recollections of people he photographed, their relatives and those who worked alongside him. The show is at the gallery's space at 46 Lafayette Street and runs through November 6, 2026.

Parks was a photographer, writer, musician and filmmaker who spent much of his career at Life magazine, documenting the fight for equality alongside the daily dignity of Black American life. The title comes from his final memoir, published in 1990, and the exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of The Gordon Parks Foundation, which he co-founded in 2006.

The central idea is to let the subjects speak. For the first time, the families of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X have reflected on Parks's pictures, with written contributions from Lonnie Ali and Qubilah Shabazz. Direct subjects also contribute: Kathleen Cleaver, who appears in the 1970 Black Panther assignment; Kate Clark Harris, whose parents, Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, were photographed in 1947 during their doll tests; Cora Taylor, from the 1956 series on segregation in the South; and Kyle Johnson, from The Learning Tree (1969). Anderson Cooper and Isabella Rossellini write about their mothers, Gloria Vanderbilt and Ingrid Bergman.

Among the photographs discussed are Doll Test, Harlem, New York (1947), showing a boy pointing at a white doll during the experiment; At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama (1956), in which a girl is lifted to a "colored only" fountain while two women look on; and the 1970 portrait of Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver in Algiers. Cora Taylor recalls her worry at the time of the shoot, and Cleaver notes how photography isolates what matters from an ordinary setting.

Other voices include filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who handled publicity for Parks's 2000 documentary Half Past Autumn; Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative; authors Alice Walker and Rebecca Walker; Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem; scholar Deborah Willis; artist Hank Willis Thomas; and Ambassador Andrew Young, who took part in the 1963 March on Washington that Parks photographed.

Together, the texts add memory and detail to images that have been studied for decades, and they show how Parks worked with the people in front of his camera.