Collected Works. Study Edition, Volume 2: 1947–1963

The second volume of Gordon Parks’s Collected Works, spanning the years on the staff of Life that made him the best known photographer at the magazine.

The volume covers 1947 to 1963, overlapping the close of Volume 1 and the opening of Volume 3. Its span takes in the assignments and extended picture stories on crime, poverty and the politics of race and class that Parks reported through the 1950s, and his fashion and portrait work of the same decade.

Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. and Paul Roth edited the Study Edition, a smaller-format reissue of the 2012 Collected Works. It runs to 1,084 pages across five clothbound volumes, arranged chronologically. The printed cardboard box they ship in is part of the design, not packaging. Texts across the set are by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Deborah Willis, Maurice Berger, Barbara Baker Burrows, Paul Roth and Parks himself. The library holds Volumes 1 to 3.