Héléna Bazin: Thank you, Sara Antonelli, for receiving me. I must say you did a wonderful job editing this book. But why did you choose to work on Gordon Parks? Why did you choose these pictures rather than others? Is their a precise message you wanted to share?

Sara Antonelli: Well, Gordon Parks is well known in the United States for the picture series he produced for Life magazine. But some middle-class Americans and most Europeans are not aware of the work Parks did as a photo-essayist over many years. So I felt like giving his work a more universal impact, by revealing it to a wider public. If I chose certain pictures, it is because I wanted to pick the most relevant ones on a topic that Parks himself held dear: social inequalities. As a matter of fact, he said that he wanted to “use [his] camera as a weapon against poverty and racism.” It was important for me to highlight his lifelong struggle against segregation and enable it to cross the borders of the United-States.

HB: So, to that extent, do you think Gordon Parks successfully manages to picture the evils of segregation in American society?

SA: What you have to keep in mind while looking at the pictures taken in Alabama in 1956 for instance is that they are all part of a much wider context. It is true that Parks tends to show a very segregated social background. But he is, first and foremost, a gifted reporter who tries to depict the epic of a family, for example the Fontenelles in Harlem, Ella Watson’s family… He doesn’t want to show them solely as victims of racism, but also as people with a very rich family life.

HB: Talking of this family epic, how is the family nucleus pictured? Is it a condemnation of segregation or does it deliver a message of hope?

SA: Actually, I think that both aspects should be taken into account. Yes, Gordon Parks denounces racism and the striking demonstrations of segregation that he witnessed both in Washington and in Alabama. However, I don’t think he openly criticizes it. He puts at stake the racial gap between Blacks and Whites, but he doesn’t carry out any kind of moral judgement. But he also wishes to shed light on the achievements of a family whose members went to university.

HB: You said that Parks was confronted to segregation both in Washington and in the South. The picture he took of Ella Watson became one of the most iconic representations of the American Gothic. What can be said about it, and how can it be seen as an opposition to the American myth of freedom?

SA: When you put them side by side, you can’t help noticing the similarities beween Parks’ photograph and Grant Wood’s painting. As a matter of fact, Ella Watson has the same facial expression as Wood’s characters: sharp, determined look and tight lips, not really smiling. On the painting, the man is holding a garden fork, just as Ella Watson is holding a broom and a mop. All three items can be used as weapons against an illusory ideal symbolized by the blurred American flag in the picture, and by the closed house in the painting. These two pieces of art served as models to Eldridge Cleaver’s picture of Huey Newton sitting in front of a kind of tapestry and holding a rifle and a lance. These pictures resound as a revolutionary toll within a very American tradition.