Department Store, Mobile, Alabama. Gordon Parks, 1956.
This photograph was part of Gordon Parks’s 1956 photo essay for Life Magazine documenting the life of the Thornton family under segregation in Alabama. The essay served as crucial documentation of the Jim Crow South and acted as a national platform for challenging racial inequality. However, his images look quite different from many other iconic civil rights photographs. In an era when the primary medium for documentary photography was black-and-white film, Parks instead chose to present these quiet images of domestic life in full colour.
His choice of subject matter further sets this series apart from others of the period. Rather than focusing on the demonstrations, boycotts, and brutality that characterised the battle for racial justice, Parks emphasised the prosaic details of one family’s life. In particular, his ability to elicit empathy through and emphasis on intimacy and shared human experience made them especially poignant.
I’ve been here! There a truck stop and a diner. In the women’s bathroom there’s a fully clothed statue and if you try to pull down the pants, an alarm sounds in the whole diner.
Bruh religious or not there’s no debating that Dreamworks Prince of Egypt (1998) is a masterpiece and one of the most visually stunning works of animation of all time. The parallels between Yocheved and Miriam singing the River Lullaby as a tear runs down their cheek and the wind blows their hair in front of their face? Incredible. The use of hieroglyphics to show how Moses learned that his father ordered the Hebrew babies slaughtered??Ingenious. The duet between Moses and Ramses where the choir chants in the background while you watch the plagues destroy Egypt and Moses is begging Ramses to let his people go and Ramses refuses and it shows them facing each other and then side by side and then Ramses walking away while Moses stands firmly??? Intense. When Moses parts the sea and the Hebrews are walking between the water and lightning strikes in the background, illuminating the silhouette of a giant shark swimming in the wall of water???? Iconic. The entire movie is just absolutely breathtaking and that’s just tea