Volpe adds that the exhibit is organized by the MFAH in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation, and is debuting at the MFAH. There’s also an accompanying exhibit here with a Houston-specific focus.

There’s also images of those in Carmichael’s audiences. The exhibit features photos of Carmichael at official events, lectures, and rallies where he’s “on,” but also quieter, private, and off-the-cuff moments with family and friends. It was happening in that moment without any façade.”

So, what we are seeing is not something prepared or. He was famous at the time and yet, just blended into the background. What that tells us is that he had that ability to be a fly on the wall. What was amazing to me is that all of them had perfect recall of the situation that was happening, but none remembered Parks being in the room. Photo by Todd Spoth “I was not alive in 1966 or ’67, so to get a real feel, I reached out to everyone in the photos who are still with us and just talked to them about the photos and the whole series.

“That’s a great question! Let me answer that in a sort of winding way,” says Lisa Volpe, exhibition curator and Associate Curator of Photography at the MFAH. It runs from October 16-January 16 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.īut what can a photo of Stokely Carmichael convey to a museumgoer that a film or essay can’t? Those five photos, along with 50 additional ones from the more than 700 which Parks shot, and ephemera from both men and the Black Power movement, are the basis of the exhibit Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power. It featured an essay by Parks with five photographs showing Carmichael in a variety of settings in the south and New York City. The resulting Life profile of Carmichael, called “The Whip of Black Power,” was published in May 1967. The two men would be put together to chronicle a speaking trip that ran through the spring of 1967. His assignment-whether it was actually voiced or not-was to illuminate through his work Black issues and interests to a largely White readership. His lens had already captured both Malcom X and Muhammad Ali. And the only Black man taking pictures for the then-dominating national periodical Life magazine, where he often chronicled the Black experience. The latter was a phrase he didn’t invent, but popularized in speeches filled with strength and urgency.Ī generation removed from Carmichael, Gordon Parks was a 53-year-old essayist and photographer. Recently elected as the Chair for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he set out on a travel campaign to spread the message of social justice of Black Power.

Black power by stokely carmichael