In March 2013, I was visiting New York City, and I took a train north to visit the Harlem Studio Museum where there just happened to be an exhibition of Gordon Parks’s project “A Harlem Family.” It was a very fortunate coincidence for me as that project was an inspiration for my thesis work in Appalachia, in which I narrowed my focus on two specific families struggling with poverty. All of Parks’s work is incredible and influential, and the Harlem Studio Museum exhibition was eye-openingly beautiful and heartbreakingly honest, as can be seen in just this small edit of images.
