American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson

A definitive study of one of the most celebrated photographs of the twentieth century: Gordon Parks's 1942 portrait of Ella Watson, a Black government charwoman posed with broom and mop before an American flag, restaging Grant Wood's American Gothic as a visual reckoning with racially segregated Washington, D.C.

The book surveys the full series Parks made with Watson during his Farm Security Administration fellowship under Roy Stryker, gathering more than 50 photographs, some never before published, alongside archival material. Parks followed Watson from her work routines to family meals and the church where she served as deaconess, composing an intimate collaborative portrait of Black life in the wartime capital. With texts by Philip Brookman, Melanee C. Harvey, Hank Willis Thomas, Salamishah Tillet and Deborah Willis, the clothbound volume accompanied the exhibition organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (January 6–June 23, 2024), later presented at the Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery.

Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was the first Black staff photographer at Life magazine and a novelist, composer and filmmaker (Shaft, 1971). This volume joins the Steidl/Gordon Parks Foundation series devoted to his archive, alongside Segregation Story and The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957.