© The Gordon Parks Foundation
Currently not on view
Isabel Beside Sick Father, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
1961
Gordon Parks, 1912–2006; born Fort Scott, KS; died New York, NY; active New York, NY
More Context
Life magazine’s first African American staff photographer, Parks produced a series of groundbreaking photo-essays, including “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty” that appeared in the June 16, 1961, issue. The essay centered on Catacumba, one of Rio de Janeiro’s hillside slums, or favelas, and Parks, who described poverty as “the most savage of all human afflictions,” focused in particular on one individual, the twelve-year-old Flavio da Silva. The eldest of eight children, Flavio took care of his family while suffering from malnutrition and untreated asthma. Here Flavio’s three-year-old sister, Isabel, cries next to her father, José, lying in bed with back pain.
More About This Object
Information
1961
Gelatin silver print
image: 33 × 49.7 cm (13 × 19 9/16 in.) sheet: 40.6 × 50.8 cm (16 × 20 in.)
Museum purchase, Hugh Leander Adams, Mary Trumbull Adams, and Hugh Trumbull Adams Princeton Art Fund
South America, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro
Signed in marker on verso: Gordon Parks
in marker on verso: FLAV 10
[no stamp]
The artist; Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, New York, NY; purchased by the Princeton University Art Museum, 2017.
