11. Gordon Parks, American Gothic, and the Coded Gaze
This weekend I was reflecting on Juneteenth, as I often do, through the lens of the photographer Gordon Parks. As the first black photographer to begin working for LIFE magazine in 1949, Parks has a special place in the canon of American photography. He is also a personal touchstone of mine. One of the most rewarding projects in my professional life was working on Parks’ catalogue raisonné–a complete list of all his artwork–supported by the Gordon Parks Foundation, which maintains his archive.
Published in five beautiful volumes by the renowned German photo publisher Steidl, the catalog chronicles flashpoints of African American life spanning various artistic mediums, continents, and decades. My contribution: dozens of essays that described each of these distinct artistic projects. Reflecting on that project from our current moment of AI saturation reminds me of how slow, focused, and emotional it was.
Parks transformed American photography by insisting on the dignity and humanity of Black subjects during the civil rights era and beyond. His 1942 photograph “American Gothic, Washington, D.C.” positioned Ella Watson, a government cleaning woman, before an American flag with her mop and broom–a wry nod to the composition of Grant Wood’s iconic 1930’s oil painting of a farmer holding a pitchfork standing next to his nonplussed wife. The juxtaposition of mop and flag, and its allusion to the barriers that separate black folks from the American dream, became one of the most iconic civil rights images. Parks spent weeks building trust with his subjects before photographing them, emphasizing that “it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph.”
To write the pithy, thoughtful essays that summarized hundreds of photographs requires deep immersion in the artist’s world. News reports about the protests he recorded; novels from the period that painted fuller pictures of Paris and New York; his own letters and memoirs: all of these weights in balance helped me in the hefty task of summing up months of years of work in a few short pages. And as a young, white scholar from an insulated upbringing in a small town, I remember approaching that task with apprehension. When one of my early drafts drew critique from the renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., another contributor to the volume–‘smart, but naive’–I looked as hard at myself in the mirror as I did the words on the page. I wanted to do this artist justice, to represent with reverence not just the struggles of the folks he photographed, but also his own confrontations with racism in work and life.
Throughout his decades-long career, Parks documented the spectrum of Black American life, from the grinding poverty of Chicago's South Side to the elegance of Harlem's cultural elite. His 1956 series “Segregation Story” for LIFE magazine captured the daily humiliations of Jim Crow with images like “At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama” and “Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama,” where Black children gaze through a chain-link fence at a whites-only playground. These photographs revealed what Parks called “the humanity of African Americans” at a time when mainstream media rarely depicted Black subjects as fully-defined people with dreams, aspirations, or rich inner lives.
Parks’ work extends far beyond documenting segregation's immediate aftermath. His later portraits of figures like Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael, and everyday families navigating integration show the long tail of racial prejudice that we're still undoing today. The catalogue raisonné project revealed how Parks consistently returned to themes of dignity, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for equality, themes that resonate powerfully with contemporary celebrations of Black freedom like Juneteenth.
Current political threats to these hard-won celebrations of Black freedom are alarming. The Trump administration’s 2025 anti-DEI executive orders seek to erase the celebration, with some federal agencies pausing all cultural observances including Juneteenth, Black History Month, and MLK Day. The antagonism extends beyond federal holidays to the crippling of government organizations that uphold civil right legislation as well. As Nikole Hannah-Jones contends in a recent New York Times piece, recent executive actions amount to “the broadest and most significant assault on civil rights and racial integration” in over a century.
When politicians promise to take over our prestigious public museums like the Smithsonian and purge them of exhibits that “divide Americans based on race,” they risk erasing the representation of certain kinds of people. That is all the more pernicious for those histories that were already fighting an uphill battle to be seen.
As many scholars and technologists have noted, AI is not inherently biased; its biases are reflections of our own cultural biases, encoded over centuries of texts and images. To be sure, the application of AI to this cultural space generally grows from good intent. The National Archives has processed 240 million digitized pages and 18 million digital images using machine learning, making them dramatically more accessible to the public. Yet promising projects can also embed troubling biases that directly impact how Black historical experience gets preserved and interpreted. Machine learning algorithms trained on datasets like ImageNet—which contains 75% men, 80% lighter-skinned individuals, and less than 5% women of color—struggle to accurately interpret historical Black photography.
MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini has documented the scope of this problem. I’ve written elsewhere about how vulnerable our identities are to facial recognition software, but Buolamwini revealed the degree to which people of color are invisible to them. Her tests showed that systems from major companies consistently misidentified darker-skinned women (often as men), with accuracy gaps reaching 34% between the best-performing group (lighter males) and worst-performing group.
Buolamwini’s concept of the “coded gaze”—her term for algorithmic bias that reflects the preferences, priorities, and prejudices of those with power to shape technology—perfectly captures how these systems perpetuate what she calls “digital dehumanization.”
What happens when someone is excluded or even intentionally removed from the historical archive gets reproduced at massive scale through AI training data. This is why it’s critical to fight not just for the visibility of archives like Parks’, but also for the representation of people of color and marginalized groups in developing AI models and tools. Just as Parks described his photography as revealing “the humanity of African Americans,” our Large Language Models need to preserve human dignity rather than reinforce racial biases.
Without such frameworks, we risk creating digital archives that amplify historical exclusions. The choice facing artists, technologists, and citizens alike is whether our digital tools will serve as weapons against enduring racist tropes, as Parks intended his camera to be, or whether they will encode and eternalize the very biases he spent his life exposing.
References
https://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/
https://steidl.de/Books/Collected-Works-0815434656.html
https://high.org/collection/outside-looking-in-mobile-alabama/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/magazine/trump-civil-rights-law-discrimination.html
https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-artificial-intelligence-systems-0212
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670356/unmasking-ai-by-dr-joy-buolamwini/
https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-makes-racist-decisions-based-dialect