Through the Lens of Gordon Parks: Photographs that Educate US

by Andréia Maria de Lima Assunção

Exhibition "Gordon Parks - I Am America" at IMS Paulista. Photo by Julia Thompson.

Recently, I had the opportunity to experience part of Gordon Parks’ (1912-2006) photographic archive. During the visit, I encountered records made between the 1940s and 1970s, in the midst of the horror of racial segregation in the United States. His photographs bring to life scenes ranging from the beauty of daily life in Harlem and rural Alabama to liberation struggles and the country’s segregationist urban design, engineered to operate through dehumanization and racial discrimination.

The architecture of separatist urbanism is laid bare in the image that opens the exhibition, Department Store (1956). In it, a Black woman and child in formal attire stand in front of a store in Mobile, Alabama, positioned with their backs to a sign that reads "colored entrance." Another record, titled Classroom for Negroes (1956), displays a school space with precarious furniture and a wood-burning stove at the center—a photograph that exposes the reality of racial segregation in Southern schools in the city of Shady Grove, Alabama.

During this period, the "Doll Test" experiment was conducted by Dr. Mamie Clark and Dr. Kenneth Clark, the first Black Americans to obtain PhDs in psychology from Columbia University in the 1940s. The study was captured by Gordon Parks in the photograph Doll Test (1947), which depicts a Black child choosing a white doll in response to questions such as "Which doll would you like to play with?" or "Show me the nice doll?"

Source: The Gordon Parks Foundation.

The dolls were identical except for their color. The results revealed the psychosocial impacts of segregationist and racist policies on the self-constitution process of young Black children. The research gained international recognition and became one of the catalysts for the Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1960s. Its findings also inspired research conducted in Brazil by the Black psychoanalyst Virgínia Bicudo, a prominent figure in Brazilian psychology regarding studies on racism and racialization processes.

The exhibition Gordon Parks - I Am America, the largest ever held in Latin America, is the result of a partnership with The Gordon Parks Foundation and is on display at the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) in São Paulo until March 1, 2026. It is a singular opportunity for teacher training and reflection on ethnic-racial relations and the political-social effects of racism. It is also worth securing a copy of the catalog, which brings together contributions on ways to practice anti-racist pedagogies.

About the author:

Andréia Maria de Lima Assunção is a clinical psychologist and researcher from Mato Grosso dedicated to studies on policies for promoting equity and the universalization of rights. She is a member of the Paulo Freire Initiative at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she conducted part of her doctoral studies with funding from CAPES. To follow her work, follow her profile on Instagram @deiadeialima.

Bibliography Consulted:

Cruz, A. C. J., Abramowicz, A. & Rodrigues, T. C. (2015). Research on children and childhood in the UNESCO Project. Electronic Journal of Education, 9(2), 321-345.

IMS (2025). Gordon Parks - I Am America. Cultural Mediation Notebooks, 1(1), 1-19.

IMS (2025). Exhibition Texts. Retrieved from https://ims.com.br/2025/10/08/gordon-parks-a-america-sou-eu-textos-da-exposicao

The Gordon Parks Foundation (n.d.). Doll Test, 1947. Retrieved from https://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/gordon-parks/photography-archive/doll-test-19472