When Crime Photography Started to See Color
Six decades ago, Gordon Parks, <em>Life</em> magazine’s first black photographer, revolutionized what a crime photo could look like. A new book reexamines one of his most powerful and prescient projects.
Photography: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, by Gordon Parks, published by Steidl
In 1957, Life magazine sent one of its star photographers on a sprawling assignment: six weeks in four of America’s biggest cities to capture scenes of urban crime. The photographer was Gordon Parks, for 20 years the only black photographer on Life’s staff, and he later described the assignment like this: “I rode with detectives through shadowy districts, climbed fire escapes, broke through windows and doors with them. Brutality was rampant. Violent death showed up from dawn to dawn.”
The story, titled “The Atmosphere of Crime,” was both prescient and incisive, the text that accompanied it a systematic dismantling of
