Gordon Parks: Collected Works. Study Edition

The most extensive publication devoted to Gordon Parks (1912–2006), this five-volume survey from Steidl and The Gordon Parks Foundation gathers five decades of work by the most influential African-American photographer of the twentieth century, from his Farm Security Administration apprenticeship of the early 1940s to the allusive color photographs of the 1990s.

Edited by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. and Paul Roth, the 2017 Study Edition reissues the 2012 Collected Works in an accessible format: 1,084 pages across five clothbound volumes, arranged chronologically (Volume 1: 1942–1948 Volume 2: 1947–1963 Volume 3: 1956–1965 Volume 4: 1952–1998 Volume 5: Parks' photo essays for Life magazine) and shipped in a printed cardboard box in place of the original's slipcase, with texts by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Deborah Willis, Maurice Berger, Barbara Baker Burrows, Paul Roth and Parks himself.

Hired by Life in 1948 as the magazine's first African-American staff photographer, Parks built extended-narrative picture stories on crime, poverty, segregation and the politics of race and class. Also a composer, author and filmmaker (The Learning Tree, Shaft), he co-founded The Gordon Parks Foundation, whose later Steidl co-publications — Segregation Story, The Atmosphere of Crime — draw on the material collected here.