November 2026
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Dresser in the Bedroom of Mrs. Ella Watson a Government Charwoman Washington DC
Summer 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Except for one very famous photograph Government charwoman (American Gothic), Washington DC (Summer 1942, below), this posting highlights a largely under appreciated aspect of one of the world’s great photographers – the photographs Black American photographer, polymath and Renaissance man Gordon Parks (1912-2006) captured during his time at The Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C., and later, the Office of War Information (OWI) (1942-1944).
In 1942, Parks became the only Black photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Think about that for a few years, and try and understand how groundbreaking this achievement was for a man of colour, in a country where Black American soldiers were only just being allowed to fight in World War Two (April 1943).1
His role as an artist, communicator, storyteller, photojournalist and social documentary photographer who exposed injustice and racial prejudice was forged in the crucible of the American capital, Washington, where he observed that, “discrimination and bigotry were worse there than any place I had yet seen.”
Parks studied the work of FSA photographers such as Lange, Shahn, Evans, Delano, Rothstein, and others. He was educated in his craft by the head of the FSA Roy Stryker where he learnt to “live the life” of his subjects by inhabiting their world, listening to their stories, and empathising with the victim – their stories revealed in subtle, intimate photographs that have real power and presence.
“What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it.”2
Through personal storytelling of everyday moments, the photographs preserve a record, a memory, a hope of a better life – for an individual, for a people and a community.
Please read the illuminating anonymous text “Ella Watson, U.S. Government Charwoman Photographer: Gordon Parks” in the posting below to gain a greater understanding into the photographer’s journey.
Many thanks to Drew Thomas Levy for allowing me to publish his words from his excellent FSA Instagram page. Recommended reading on and viewing of the FSA photographic archive.
All photographs are from the Library of Congress and are in the public domain.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ African American flying units first saw combat in April 1943 with the Tuskegee-trained 99th Pursuit Squadron, while ground combat units like the 92nd Infantry Division (“Buffalo Soldiers”) entered combat in Italy in September 1944, and the all-Black 761st Tank Battalion entered ground combat in Europe on November 7–8, 1944. (Various sources)
2/ Martin H. Bush, “A Conversation with Gordon Parks,” in Martin H. Bush, The Photographs of Gordon Parks (Wichita, Kansas: Wichita State University, 1983), 38
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I think Roy [Stryker] stirred the interest in me to try and get to know people and get to know all kinds of people better and investigate their ills and their prejudices and their goods and their evil.”
Gordon Parks, oral history interview, December 30, 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
In 1942, Gordon Parks became the first Black photographer hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Operating under Roy Stryker, Parks utilised his camera to powerfully document poverty, systemic racism, and segregation. His work during this era fundamentally changed the lens through which America viewed its social and economic conditions. His work directly challenged institutional bigotry and helped pave the way for his later groundbreaking career at LIFE magazine.
Parks’s FSA work uniquely combined documentary storytelling with profound social critique. After facing intense daily racism in Washington, he used his camera to expose inequalities within government buildings and local communities. His subjects ranged from federal workers to impoverished families, illustrating the struggles and dignity of Black Americans during World War II.
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Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Government charwoman, Washington DC
Summer 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Government charwoman (American Gothic), Washington DC
Summer 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
This Gordon Parks portrait of Ella Watson, a government charwoman, or custodian, was taken at her place of employment, as she cleaned offices “after regular hours” [5pm – 1am for over 20 years] on what was undoubtedly a hot and humid summer evening in Washington DC in August 1942. Along with Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” it must be counted as one of the most iconic images in the entire FSA-OWI archive. …
If Parks had only managed to frame even just one of these images, he would’ve nonetheless been successful in capturing a humane portrait. He did more than that, of course: capturing both a humane portrait of a dignified individual and a profoundly powerful symbolic image that appears to hold within its frame so much profound truth about the complicated intersections of race, class, and gender that inform our ideas about American patriotism and power.
In addition to all of that, Parks also followed Watson home and captured images of her apartment, her family, neighborhood stores in which she shopped, and the church where she prayed on Sundays. Across the full collection of images … Parks moved far beyond the symbolism of this rightly famous first photograph, creating a visually arresting portrait of a complex human life.
Drew Thomas Levy on his FSA Instagram page
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Government charwoman, Washington DC
Summer 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Ella Watson, U.S. Government Charwoman Photographer: Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks was born in Kansas in 1912 and spent his youth in Minnesota. During the Depression a variety of jobs, including stints as a musician and as a waiter on passenger trains, took him to various parts of the northern United States. He took up photography during his travels and by 1940 had made his first serious attempts to earn a living from the art as a self-taught fashion photographer in Minneapolis and Chicago. Though he had experienced racial discrimination outside the South, it was in the southern city of Washington, D.C., that Parks “found out what prejudice was really like.” In 1942, an opportunity to work for the Farm Security Administration brought the photographer to the nation’s capital; Parks later recalled that “discrimination and bigotry were worse there than any place I had yet seen.”1
Parks came to Washington on a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a foundation dedicated to research about the South, which had a special program to encourage work of all kinds by promising blacks. In the irreverent words of the friend who told him about the program, “It’s a fund set up for exceptionally able spooks and white crackers.”2 As a Rosenwald fellow, Parks joined the august company of Ralph Bunche, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and many others.3
Parks, who had admired the Farm Security Administration photographs for some time, planned to spend his fellowship year as an apprentice photographer in Stryker’s section and had received encouragement from the FSA Jack Delano when he was applying for the fellowship.4 But when he arrived in Washington, he recalled in 1983, Stryker resisted, expressing worries about the reaction of others – in the agency as well as in the city – to a black photographer. “When I went there,” Parks said, “Roy didn’t want to take me into the FSA, but the Rosenwald people were a part of that whole Rooseveltian thing. They insisted: ‘Roy, you’ve got to do it.'” As Parks remembered it, Will Alexander – the vice-president of the Rosenwald Fund and the former head of the Farm Security Administration and thus Stryker’s old boss – delivered the final nudge.5
Parks’s autobiography and interviews emphasise the importance of the education Stryker gave him.6 After asking Parks to leave his cameras in the office, Stryker sent the newly arrived photographer around Washington, instructing him to visit stores, restaurants, and theaters. When Parks was refused service, he became furious and returned to the office ready to “show the rest of the world what your great city of Washington, D.C. is really like,” proposing to photograph scenes of injustice and portraits of bigots. In response, Stryker sent Parks to the file to study the work of Lange, Shahn, Evans, Delano, Rothstein, and others. Parks studied their photographs of gutted fields, dispossessed migrants, and the gaunt faces of people caught in the Depression. Although some might lay these tragedies to God, Parks wrote, “the research accompanying these stark photographs accused man himself–especially the lords of the land.” As the effectiveness of photographing victims instead of perpetrators and the importance of the words that accompany photographs sank in, Parks concluded, “I began to get the point.”7
One evening a few weeks later when he was alone in the office with Stryker, Parks said he was still seeking a way to expose intolerance with a camera. Stryker pointed out a charwoman at work in the building. “Go have a talk with her,” he said, “See what she has to say about life and things.” Parks complied, and later recalled his first conversation with Ella Watson: She began to spill out her life’s story. It was a pitiful one. She had struggled alone after her mother had died and her father had been killed by a lynch mob. She had gone through high school, married and become pregnant. Her husband was accidentally shot to death two days before their daughter was born. By the time the daughter was eighteen, she had given birth to two illegitimate children, dying two weeks after the second child’s birth. What’s more, the first child had been striken with paralysis a year before its mother died.8
The information about Watson in the official files is considerably more understated than Parks’s recollection. The captions and catalog card for the lot inform us that Watson’s household included her adopted daughter and grandchildren and that her annual salary was $1080. But these materials do not explain that the children were left with neighbours while Watson worked, nor do they highlight a detail Parks found telling. One of the offices Watson cleaned was occupied by a woman – presumably white – who served in higher capacity. But both women had started work at the same time, with the same accomplishments and education.9
Parks made his first photographs of Watson in an office with a large American flag on the wall, two of which are included here. Both pictures are carefully posed, and the multiple shadows cast by the office furniture indicate that Parks used an elaborate three-flash setup. The close-up version is one of his most famous photographs, serving as the frontispiece in Parks’s word-and-picture poem Moments without Proper Names, a book dedicated to Roy Stryker and containing a memorial poem for Farm Security Administration photographer John Vachon.10 Parks’s autobiography describes Stryker’s immediate reactions to the picture:
My first photograph of [Watson] was unsubtle. I overdid it and posed her, Grant Wood style, before the American flag, a broom in one hand, a mop in the other, staring straight into the camera. Stryker took one look at it the next day and fell speechless.
“Well, how do you like it?” I asked eagerly.
He just smiled and shook his head. “Well?” I insisted.
“Keep working with her. Let’s see what happens,” he finally replied. I followed her for nearly a month – into her home, her church, and wherever she went. “You’re learning,” Stryker admitted when I laid the photographs out before him late one evening. “You’re showing you can involve yourself in other people. This woman has done you a great service. I hope you understand this.” I did understand.11
The later pictures in the series were less polemical than this initial image. “That was my first lesson in how to approach a subject,” Parks said later, “that you didn’t have to go in with all horns blasting away.”12 This selection, drawn from the ninety images selected for the file, includes the view from Watson’s window near Washington’s Logan Circle, omits pictures of her neighbourhood grocery and Chinese laundry, and emphasises the activities at St. Martin’s Spiritual Church, which was the subject of more photographs than any other aspect of Watson’s life. In the photograph of Watson being anointed at the altar, a double exposure adds the ghostly figure of another parishioner and Reverend Gassaway. The double exposure may have been an accident, but the photograph’s suggestion of the spirituality of the service is effective.
Several of the photographs attest to Parks’s concern for arrangement and lighting, including a number in which reflections in mirrors play a significant role. Two of these are presented here. One serves as a portrait of an extended family: Watson and her grandchildren sit in the kitchen, her adopted daughter is seen reflected in the bureau mirror, and between them a man and a woman look out from a photograph in a picture frame. Parks does not identify the couple, but they are probably Watson and her husband or perhaps her parents. In another mirror photograph, the reflected image of two grandchildren stands behind Watson’s home shrine, implying her equal affection for family and religion. Parks made extensive use of flash, not only in these photographs, but also in pictures like the one of Watson sweeping the office floor, illuminated by a flashgun under a desk.
In 1983, when Parks reflected on the lessons he had learned from photographing this series, his thoughts returned to the matter of intolerance. He told an interviewer that he could not simply photograph the person who had discriminated against him, “and say, ‘This is a bigot,’ because bigots have a way of looking just like everybody else. What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it.”13 In the same interview, he underscored the reasoning behind the title of his 1966 autobiography, A Choice of Weapons: “I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil.”14 Parks’s weapon is the camera.
Anonymous. “Ella Watson, U.S. Government Charwoman Photographer: Gordon Parks” from ‘Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives’ on the Library of Congress website Nd [Online] Cited 21/07/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Footnotes
1/ Martin H. Bush, “A Conversation with Gordon Parks,” in Martin H. Bush, The Photographs of Gordon Parks (Wichita, Kansas: Wichita State University, 1983), 36.
2/ Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 208.
3/ Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 183-85, 268-69.
4/ F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties, 158.
5/ Bush, “A Conversation with Gordon Parks,” 56.
6/ Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 220-51; Gordon Parks interview by Richard Doud, 28 April 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Martin Bush, “A Conversation with Gordon Parks,” 36-38 and 56-58.
7/ Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 228.
8/ Ibid., 230-31.
9/ Ibid.
10/ Gordon Parks, Moments without Proper Names (New York: Viking Press, 1975).
11/ Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 231.
12/ Gordon Parks interview by Richard Doud, 28 April 1964, quoted in Hurley, Portrait of a Decade, 158.
13/ Bush, “Conversation with Gordon Parks,” 38.
14/ Ibid., 42.
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mrs. Ella Watson, a government charwoman, receiving anointment from Reverend Clara Smith during the “flower bowl demonstration,” a service held once a year at the St. Martin’s Spiritual Church. Reverend Vondell Gassaway is the pastor, Washington DC
Summer 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks also attended worship services with Ella Watson at St. Martin’s Spiritual Church. He took a number of photos during the church’s “annual flower bowl demonstration” service. Not all of the images feature Watson and together they offer a fascinating glimpse into a particular corner of African American Christianity.
Drew Thomas Levy on his FSA Instagram page
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Chinese laundry
Summer 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
As part of his photo essay on the life and work of government charwoman Ella Watson, Gordon Parks took a small collection of photos inside the “Chinese laundry” that occupied the ground floor of the building in which Watson rented her apartment. The laundry was run by Johnny Lew, who is visible in the second of the two images presented here, both of which include an image of FDR, who was at the time these images were made serving in his third term as President while helping to steer the U.S. through the Second War.
Drew Thomas Levy on his FSA Instagram page
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Chinese laundry
Summer 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Grandchildren of Mrs Ella Watson, a government charwoman
August 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Three children waiting in the kitchen while their mother prepares the evening meal
June 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
In 1944, as the Second World War continued to rage on two fronts, Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal completed his study of race relations in the United States: “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.” This Gordon Parks photograph, taken in the nation’s capital during the summer of 1942, while Myrdal and his team were actively engaged in gathering evidence for their study, might well have served as a visual translation of some of the problems “An American Dilemma” sought to expose: most notably the interconnection of race and poverty in modern American life.
The succinct but nonetheless evocative caption of this photograph reads, “Washington, D.C. Three children waiting in the kitchen while their mother prepares the evening meal.”
Drew Thomas Levy on his FSA Instagram page
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Grandfather and grandchild on Seaton Road, Washington DC
1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
This image reflects Parks’s trademark approach to his subjects: finding intimate, deeply human moments within environments marked by poverty and structural racism. Rather than resorting to sensationalism, he dignified everyday Black families. The photograph documents a tender family interaction, serving as a quiet but powerful act of resilience in a segregated city.
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Pouring lemonade at a birthday party on Seaton Road, Washington DC
June 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Interiors of wrecked homes on Independence Avenue across from the Smithsonian Institute
June 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Interiors of wrecked homes on Independence Avenue across from the Smithsonian Institute
June 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Interiors of wrecked homes on Independence Avenue across from the Smithsonian Institute
June 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mr. Branch, resident of the James Creek dwellings, Washington DC
November 1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks framed this portrait of a family seated at the kitchen table “saying grace” in Washington DC in November 1942. The photo’s caption identifies the husband and father as “Mr. Branch, resident of the James Creek dwellings,” a new federal government housing project constructed in the southwest section of the city. In the archive, the image, along with another two dozen or so photos taken by Parks in October and November of 1942, is filed under the heading, “wartime activities of Negroes.” This was, of course, not simply a “wartime image.” Or perhaps better put, the wartime context of this image was not simply the global crisis raging across Europe and in the South Pacific. Mr. Branch’s family, like all African Americans, was also engaged in what the Pittsburgh Courier characterised as the “Double V for Victory” campaign, seeking to eradicate fascism abroad and racism at home.
This photograph resonates powerfully across the decades, reminding us how much African American families invested in the emerging mid-century version of the American Dream, with its emphasis on home ownership and family, even as the government programs being constructed to make such opportunities more readily available were structured in ways that largely excluded African Americans.
Visually, Parks’s photo also calls to mind the work of another great African American artist, Carrie Mae Weems, whose photographic “Kitchen Table” series explores issues related to identity, marriage, love, and parenthood. I’ve included a couple of images from the series to drive home the (visual) point.
Drew Thomas Levy on his FSA Instagram page
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Disabled child
1942
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Woman who says she is 104 years old, Daytona Beach, Florida
February 1943
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Three-year old and woman who says she is 104 years old, Daytona Beach, Florida
February 1943
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Three-year old, Daytona Beach, Florida
February 1943
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks, (1912-2006) was a documentarian whose work covers many genres from reportage to fashion. A self-taught photographer with little professional training, Parks won a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942; this led to a position with the photography section of The Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C., and later, the Office of War Information (OWI).
Working for these agencies, which were then chronicling the nation’s social conditions, Parks quickly developed a personal style that would make him among the most celebrated photographers of his era. The subject of his work covers American life and culture from the early 1940s into the 2000s, with a focus on race relations, poverty, civil rights, and urban life. Parks was also a distinguished composer, author, and filmmaker who interacted with many of the leading people of his era – from politicians and artists to athletes and other celebrities.
Parks’ extraordinary pictures allowed him to break the color line in professional photography while he created remarkably expressive images that consistently explored the social and economic impact of poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination. In 1944, Parks left the OWI to work for the Standard Oil Company’s photographic documentary project. Around this time, he was also becoming a freelance photographer for Glamour and Ebony, which expanded his photographic practice and further developed his distinct style.
Anonymous. “Gordon Parks: The Farm Security Photographs 1942 to 1944,” on the Haverford College website Nd [Online] Cited 21/07/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
School choir at Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona Beach, Florida
February 1943
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
In February 1943, Gordon Parks traveled south to Daytona Beach, Florida to document Bethune-Cookman College. Founded by Mary McLeod Bethune as a an educational and industrial training school along the Tuskegee model in 1904, the college had been approved by the Florida Department of Education to offer a four-year liberal arts degree beginning in 1941.
Here Parks captures the school choir and in so doing demonstrates his ability to gain the confidence of his subjects. There is an intimacy to this image that must derive in part from the fact that Parks was himself a relatively young African-American man. How unusual it must have been in the lives of these young people to encounter the face of the nation’s government as a kind of mirror of themselves.
Drew Thomas Levy on his FSA Instagram page
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Bethune-Cookman College, Radio technicians’ class, Daytona Beach, Florida
February 1943
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Young boy whose ambition is to become a soldier, Daytona Beach, Florida
February 1943
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Tuskegee Airmen, Michigan
1943
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress
Public domain
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