Gordon Parks, Raiding Detectives, Chicago, 1957. Photograph. MoMA/Gordon Parks Foundation.

Doctoral student in art history Tara Kraft-Ainsworth will present the lecture “Life is a Novel: Gordon Parks and Chester Himes’s (Re)Definition of Criminality.”

Lecture Abstract

In 1957, Gordon Parks completed a series of photographs to accompany Life magazine’s “The Atmosphere of Crime,” an essay that presented itself as a comprehensive analysis of illegality in the United States. Concurrently, Chester Himes published his first serial detective novel, For the Love of Imabelle, trading the canonical white detective for two Black cops, and swapping the narrative voice of the sleuth for that of the framed suspect. While Parks and Himes were not acquainted, this paper brings their work into conversation with one another because of their shared response to the visual and verbal language of American criminal culture found in comic books, noir films, and pulp fiction during the 1950s. Drawing from contemporary scholarship on the policing of the Black body and primary sources, I argue that when we compare Parks’s Raiding Detectives (1957, photograph) and Himes’s description of detection in For the Love of Imabelle, the artists’ appropriation of mainstream signifiers becomes not only an interrogation of the definitions of detective and criminal, but fact and fiction. I propose Parks and Himes’s use of popular culture can be read as a challenge to the fixity of these two genres. By subverting and altering the familiar imagery, Parks and Himes put on display both the problematic correlation of criminality with the Black body during this historical moment, as well as the way language can frame a fictional idea as truth.