Howard University and the Gordon Parks Foundation have announced the acquisition of 252 photographs representing the arc of Gordon Parks’s career from the 1940s to the 1990s. 

The Gordon Parks Legacy Collection, a combined gift and purchase, will be organized thematically by subject into 15 study sets and housed in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. The collection traces Parks’s progression from early portraits of rising talents to becoming a leading photographer of Black celebrity through the subsequent decades. Represented are mid-career works such as Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun, New York, New York, 1959; Duke Ellington in Concert, New York, 1960; Louis Armstrong, Los Angeles, California, 1969. The collection also includes his work with fashion model Iman from the 1970s, jazz musician Miles Davis in the ’80s, and filmmaker Spike Lee in the ’90s.

“This landmark collection of photographs by one of the great chroniclers of Black American life provides artists, journalists, and scholars at Howard University with a new resource to study and embrace the lasting impact of Gordon Parks,” said Gordon Parks Foundation executive director Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. “As a photographer working in segregated Washington, D.C., in 1942, Parks established his first connections with Howard, which then embodied many of the values that his work came to represent. For him, that was a learning experience, which makes Howard a fitting place to keep his art alive.”

(Photo credit: Gordon Parks; Untitled, Washington, D.C.; 1963)