A camera not only takes photographs, it is also a powerful, intelligent instrument against oppression, racism, violence, inequality and poverty.

With his humanitarian view of the world, Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was one of the most important and critical chroniclers of American society and its problems, particularly the oppression of the black community and the Civil Rights movement. He worked actively for political issues that today have lost none of their explosiveness. At the same time, Gordon Parks worked for magazines like Vogue or Life. This fascinating simultaneity of glamour and misery makes his work in retrospect an overwhelming visual social history of America during the twentieth century.