New book revisits Gordon Parks’ groundbreaking photography in ‘A Harlem Family’

During its heyday, LIFE magazine reached roughly one out of every three Americans. Over its run, the magazine commissioned more than 10 million photographs in 120,000 stories, according to their archive. The photo stories that LIFE published brought the world into the homes of readers in a very intimate and powerful way.

Gordon Parks was one of the best, and of all the stories that he did for LIFE, “A Harlem Family” stands out above the rest. It ran in the March 8, 1968, issue of the magazine in a special section titled “The Cycle of Despair: The Negro and the City.” The release of the story was timed to come out the week after the Kerner Commission report that looked at the cause of the “explosion” of urban “riots.”

In 2012, Steidl first published “Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967” as a book in conjunction with the Gordon Parks Foundation and the Studio Museum of Harlem. Since then, additional photographs from the series have been discovered, and research has been conducted about the accompanying film, “Diary of a Harlem Family” (1968). This new volume tells the story of Parks’ project more fully with their inclusion. The book also contains previously unpublished texts and ephemera, including correspondence and other documents Parks amassed over the years while he kept in touch with the Fontenelles, letters written by LIFE readers showing an outpouring of support for the family, and the transcript of a conversation between Parks and Michael Torosian about the making of the story.

As Leigh Raiford, a scholar, author, 2026 Gordon Parks Foundation Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing, and professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, recounts in her essay in the new book, “Parks later recounted that his contribution to ‘The Cycle of Despair’ grew out of a conversation between him and a friend, LIFE’s assistant managing editor, Philip Kunhardt. Over lunch, Kunhardt asked Parks, ‘Why is there so much racial tension across the country? And why are Blacks rioting in the big cities practically every month?’”

Kunhardt was not the only one wondering what was going on in the cities. Between 1964 and 1967, there had been more than 100 uprisings in more than 50 cities across the United States, driven by poverty, social inequality, police overreach, high unemployment, and overt racism. White Americans who lived outside of the cities had no idea what was going on, while some in the cities chose to ignore these issues or overlook them for far too long. 

After the conversation, Parks decided he was going to follow a single family for the special edition. Working with Robert Haggins, who directed an antipoverty program (Neighborhood Board #4 at 123rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue), Parks interviewed potential families but found that many were too embarrassed about their living conditions to take part in the project. In the end, Bessie Fontenelle agreed to let her family be photographed for the story.

“Parks spent a month with the Fontenelles, eating meals with them (sometimes food he’d brought them), following them through the neighborhood, speaking with them individually and collectively,” Raiford said via email. “As with most of his assignments, Parks first sought to build rapport with the family, which in this case meant he started the assignment without his camera. It was a week before he actually started making photographs.”

The searing photographs that Parks made of the Fontenelles brought home what life for Black Americans living in poverty in the inner cities was really like. He walked the tightrope of both showing the truth of the living conditions of the family while maintaining their dignity in front of the camera.

Parks also never stopped worrying that his work was exploiting the Fontenelles. He had grown up in poverty, but he still found their situation almost unbearable. Parks was aware of how far he had come, and although he tried to help the family, there was also tragedy.

“Once the article came out, letters of support, and also derision, flooded LIFE’s offices. Many included checks or cash. Parks convinced the magazine to match the donations in order to purchase a home for the Fontanelles out of Harlem and in the suburbs,” Raiford said. “Tragedy befell the family when the house caught fire, killing father Norman, Sr. and 8-year-old Kenneth. For the rest of his life, Parks continued to check in with the family, providing cash on occasion and [paying] for the funerals of several of the family members.”

“A Harlem Family” still stands as one of Parks’ most powerful, and important, perspectives on the social and economic issues that affected everyday people. He had spent 20 years at LIFE by the time the article was published in 1968, and was in his mid-50s. The movie he made of it, using his photographs along with additional film footage and his narration, played on PBS and showed his interest in moving into creating films. In fact, soon after “A Harlem Family,” Parks went on to direct “The Learning Tree,” based on his semi-autobiographical first novel that he had published in 1963.

“‘A Harlem Family’ was also one of the last of his ‘damage’ essays — the kind of sociological studies about the devastating impacts of social economic forces on the lives of everyday people that Parks had perfected over the course of his two decades with LIFE magazine,” Raiford said. “In the Black Power era, Black audiences especially were interested in different kinds of stories and depictions of their lives, and Parks’ turn to filmmaking (as well as poetry, painting, and music composition) is also evidence of that desire for new kinds of representation. I think by 1968, Parks was outgrowing LIFE magazine, its appeal to white liberalism, and the social issue photo-essay format along with it. ‘A Harlem Family’ was a nail in the coffin, so to speak.”

The story remains a poignant one in today’s world. The issues that Parks covered through the story of the Fontenelles are once again coming into play through the government’s current regression in social safety nets and more heavy-handed policing policy, which is once again leading to higher rates of poverty, racial inequality, rising job insecurity, and the normalization of racism. The same factors of the 1960s drove the Black Lives Movement, again to the surprise of white Americans who again were either ignorant of the issues, or simply overlooked them. And one can anticipate the will toward unrest.

“‘A Harlem Family’ is important for at least two reasons,” Raiford wrote. “First, in the context of the Kerner Commission report and the urban uprisings of the 1960s, when the government solution to Black poverty was more police, more prisons and more surveillance, Parks’ photo essay foregrounds economic inequity and racial injustice to me. Even more, he does so by centering the Fontenelles as human individuals deserving of dignity and respect, while also making clear that they are representatives of the larger societal forces that left them in the pitiable circumstances in which Parks photographed them. I understand Parks as a visual theorist of racial capitalism: the interlocked conditions of race and poverty. ‘A Harlem Family’ showcases the kind of brilliant work Parks did for decades, photographing Black and poor subjects in their beauty and complexity, outside of the grammars of victimhood and pathology.”

“Diary of a Harlem Family 1967/1968” is published by Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation, and can be ordered through the Steidl website at steidl.de.