Children Looking Through Window of Car, Harlem

1941

Exhibition of photographs of Chicago’s Black ghetto

While chronicling the South Side Black ghetto of Chicago, he sees an exhibition of these photographs win him a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA); other accounts link his invitation to the FSA to the Rosenwald Fellowship of 1942.

1942

Receives the Rosenwald Fellowship

The Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, $200 a month with the choice of employer, rewards his work in Chicago, especially his capturing of the myriad experiences of African Americans across the city. It contributes to his being asked to join the FSA, which under Roy Stryker was chronicling the nation’s social conditions.

c. 1942

Stryker calls the picture an indictment of America

Seeing the photograph, Stryker says it is an indictment of America that could get all of his photographers fired, and urges Parks to keep working with Watson, which leads to a series of pictures of her daily life. Parks later says his first image was overdone and not subtle.

4 mars 1944

Son born: David Parks

from the mid-1940s

Becomes a fashion photographer for Vogue

After leaving the Office of War Information he moves to Harlem and works as a freelance fashion photographer for Vogue; editor Alexander Liberman, despite the racist attitudes of the day, hires him to shoot a collection of evening gowns. He develops a distinctive style of photographing his models in motion rather than in static poses, and his fashion work appears in Vogue from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s.

mid-1940s

Works on the Standard Oil project in New Jersey

After leaving the Office of War Information — where he photographed the all-black 332d Fighter Group, the Tuskegee Airmen, and resigned when he could not follow them to the overseas war theatre — he follows Stryker to the Standard Oil Photography Project in New Jersey, whose photographers shoot small towns and industrial centers. His most striking pictures of these years include “Dinner Time at Mr. Hercules Brown’s Home, Somerville, Maine” (1944), “Car Loaded with Furniture on Highway” (1945), “Self Portrait” (1945) and “Ferry Commuters, Staten Island, N.Y.” (1946).