Gordon Parks: Part One review – works of riveting beauty, dignity and anger

Iced milk, banana splits, pecan ice-cream and butterscotch: they’re all for sale on a sweltering sidewalk in Mobile, Alabama. It is the long summer of 1956. Two women in fabulous sunray skirts and matching earrings stand patiently on the right as a handsome young father in shades helps his daughter to the drinking fountain on the left. Three more children are waiting thirstily for water.

The eye moves round the scene, taking in the sashed dresses, the ads for malts and shakes and newfangled Tupperware. It is a moment before you notice the children’s bare feet, and another before you connect the queue with the other fountain – entirely unused – in the centre. A little girl stands beside it, forbidden to drink. “White Only” is lettered upon it (in white).

The photographs in Gordon Parks’s celebrated Segregation Series are majestic in scale – at times almost four feet square – and profoundly dignified. They go deep into a time and place in which black lives are publicly divided from white. Black children must go to this segregated classroom (all of them, no matter what grade). Black teenagers must buy their hotdogs from a window round the side; they can’t go through the front door of the diner. Black families can’t move out of their allotted portion of land, no matter what money they make. “Lots for Colored”, mutters the derelict sale sign, in one image, installed above a patch of scrub.

Parks (1912-2006) knew the Jim Crow laws only too well. The youngest of 15 children born to a black farmer in Kansas, he went to a segregated elementary school. When he was 11, three white boys tried to drown him in a river; by the age of 14 he had left home. This early life is the stuff of which Parks later wrote poetry, music, memoirs, novels and semi-autobiographical films. But for some people, he is still best known as the director of the 1971 movie Shaft, pioneering classic of the blaxploitation genre.

In 1956, Parks was living and working in New York, the first black photographer to be employed by Life magazine. He was sent to Alabama on an assignment that would prove both harrowing and dangerous – followed around in his car, threatened and chased by white supremacists. But they make no appearance in the photographs Parks took for Life, and for himself. And instead of the black-and-white shots of protest marches or racist violence he might have produced, Parks chose to show the daily life of black families in living colour.

This colour is low-toned and beautiful, rich in all its hues. Partly that is to do with the period film stock, but also somehow with the noticing of everything in the scene – what colour are the hand-me-down clothes, what colour is the flaking paint around a porch, what colour is an old corduroy sofa that has served several generations. A washing line for a family of 10 becomes a bunting of faded blue flags.

Turquoise Sunday-best dresses sing in the deep, dark doorway of the clapboard church, perched unsteadily on breeze blocks against snakes and flooding. A sorrowful boy stands on a porch, his red hat made of cheap plastic. The black family in the “colored waiting room” of the bus station gather tensely around something unseen, self-evidently their tickets, and not even the golden gleam of ribbons, tie and skirt can dispel the anxious shadows.

Parks was always tremendous at the oblique view – the mother who turns away from us to make sure her infants are safe outside the house; the boy in the crowd who catches sight of someone offstage – the arrival of some figure of authority slowly registering in his face. One of his strangest and most affecting photographs pictures a group of black children standing with their backs to us.

They are looking through a wire fence at some sort of glistening green paradise beyond. Which turns out to be a playground for white children, magically equipped with real swings and a slide. How could any parent ever begin to explain this baffling and inhuman prohibition to the children outside?

This show also includes Parks’s famous photographs of black Muslims: Malcolm X in closeup, raising a rhetorical hand at a Chicago gathering in 1963; Ethel Shariff leading a formation of women in pristine white veils. In Parks’s photograph of a Harlem rally, not a single figure is fully visible in the deep shadows, only the words on the black-and-white placards held aloft: We are Living in a Police State. Liberty or Death.

It is impossible to see these signs of the times now without considering their significance today. It is more than half a century since the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts seemed to enshrine some basic standards of racial equality in America. Yet what seemed settled now appears unmoored. Nobody visiting this riveting show could fail to think, in turn, of images of extreme opposition today.

And the parallel is at its most poignant in the photographs of Mr and Mrs Albert Thornton and three generations of their family in Mobile, Alabama. Parks spent a long time getting to know the Thorntons. The constraints on their lives are made apparent with a slow and quiet dignity that belongs to both the subjects and the photographer himself. The limitations on their education, job opportunities, hopes of housing, on their pride and their freedom: all are here in these pensive photographs.

A portrait of the Thorntons in youth hangs on the wall above them in considerable old age. You can still see traces of all that early hope, verve and mischief in Albert’s face; still see all the same withheld anxieties in his wife. The old sofa endures. And the low table before them is set with monochrome photographs of the multiplying family down the years, beneath a piece of glass; the album of their lives. Look closer, and it does not seem as if anything has changed in all these many decades, except for the advent of colour photography.

In old age, Parks summed up a photographic career of over 60 years with a pithy statement: “I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America – poverty, racism, discrimination.” To see these old photographs now, some of them more than 60 years old, is to be shocked all over again at the inexplicable evils of racism. These images speak again with their grave and solemn voice, out of the past and directly into our present.

• Gordon Parks: Part One is at Alison Jacques Gallery, London W1, until 1 August; Part Two runs from 1 September to 1 October