It was a brisk afternoon a few weeks after “Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror” opened, and he was walking me through the galleries, which will be full of iconic Parks photographs up through the first week of November.
“I did two shows back-to-back where we showed the fashion and all the unexpected things that people never knew that Gordon did,” Shainman said. “And then we flipped it to all the iconic images of the March on Washington. So it was really fun to show people that. I’m always combing through, looking for images that you didn’t know about. It’s harder to do than you think.”
For his fifth show of Parks images, Shainman asked a number of luminaries—those who worked with Parks, knew Parks, or posed for Parks—to contribute written texts on the great photographer. Ava DuVernay, who was a publicist for Parks’s 2000 documentary, Half Past Autumn, wrote one. So did two women close to his greatest muses: Lonnie Ali, Muhammad Ali’s widow, and Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X.
Anderson Cooper also contributed a remembrance. I thought perhaps he participated due to his status as a well-known art collector, but he also has a more personal connection to Parks: His mother, the railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, had a decades-long romantic relationship with the photographer. (It was nonmonogamous for at least some of the time, and they were open about being open.)
