 The year 1957, the place the shadowy inner city crime dens of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. A world of supposedly glamorous gangsters, scallywag hoodlums and femme fatales with hearts of gold. The assignment? A six-week journey to explore crime across America. The photographer chosen? Gordon Parks. A veteran who had worked for the Farm Security Administration and was also the first African-American staff photographer for Life Magazine. The result? A journey through hell where brutality was rampant and violent death showed up from dawn to dawn. How exactly did Gordon Parks create this photo essay that almost 60 years after its publication still speaks eloquently and continues to challenge our preconceptions about crime? How's it? How's it? Gordon Parks was quite simply put a man of exceptionally broad talent. Not only was he a great photographer with an exceptionally long career but he was also a writer, a poet, a musician and a film director. Throughout his career, Gordon Parks was well known for his humanitarian stance and a deep commitment to the idea of social justice being championed through his photography. When looking at the work of photographers who create images that are also part of an agenda, they form the basis of a picture essay or that they have a message to convey, it could be quite a powerful experience to look upon the photography with the eyes of its intended audience. In the case of the atmosphere of crime, that would be the post-war world of America. The shiny, chrome-detailed land of prosperity, where the idea of criminality was portrayed through a Hollywood-like lens in films such as The Big Heat and on TV in shows like The Untouchables and Mike Hammer. Of course the reality, as you'll discover, was somewhat quite different to what Hollywood would lead us to believe. It was grim and uncompromising. And I saw some of the most outlandish things as a crime photographer for a few months. I think that one, send me back home immediately. I was so afraid of it, what I was seeing, and what it would do to me and do to my personality, do to the rest of my life. Once you learn to see these photographs in a way that goes beyond simply appreciating their aesthetic qualities, you're going to have a key to getting a deeper appreciation for documentary photography. Contained within its pages, the atmosphere of crime has some unique tools that you are going to find exceptionally useful. In 1957, when life asked Gordon Parks to undertake the assignment that would become the atmosphere of crime, you know, he'd already been with the magazine for 10 years and was an experienced photographer whose empathy, his compassion, and his iron conviction that his photography could bring about social change. It was only after I became a life photographer that I knew that I must assume the responsibility that it would take to consider myself an excellent photographer so that I could open the door for other black writers and photographers after me. But my first worry was getting on the staff and that's what I worked at. Gordon Parks makes use of a three-step process to impart such power into his photography. Each one of them is a master's stroke when it comes to shaping the way that you, the viewer, digest and reads these photographs. Like in literature music, which Parks has also equally adept, these visual narrative skills are hidden in plain sight. Cinema was still a major cultural force in the 1950s and Gordon Parks used this to his advantage. Now parents have long known that the best way to get a child to take some medicine is to disguise it, you know, to wrap it in something familiar and sweet. Throughout the images in the atmosphere of crime, there is an exceptionally strong cinematic quality to a great number of the images. You can get a feel for them working his stills from a film or being posters advertising the next crime caper at the local cinema. They connect with the viewer in ways that the viewer can easily digest, almost inviting you in by saying, look, it's okay here, you're familiar with this. This concept of cinematic quality within Gordon Parks' photography, certainly some of the images, is greatly emphasised in these two frames here. This one we have some framing within the frame, so the police officers are surrounded by this windscreen. And here we're looking down onto the scene from, you know, from a window. And in both of these respects, I think what he's trying to say is this is a world that we're okay with being in, you're safe. Here there's a physical barrier between us and what could be conceivably called the real world. And in this image here, you know, we're going to remove because we're looking out from windows so we can feel safe. And it's almost like he's inviting us to spend some time in this world that this is a world that we're kind of familiar with and we're okay being here. And then he gets a chance to work his magic on us. You also see this idea with the photographs being in colour. To have had them in black and white as the majority of Parks' earlier work had been, would have allowed the viewer to simply lump the story in with the rest of the photography in that issue, just to skim over it. It's no surprise we're looking at the photographs with a kick, cursory glance flicking from page to page, as one so often does, that the feeling that springs to mind is that of a crime movie from the period. Parks was a director of a number of films, including Shaft. So he was well aware of the need to create a sense of place, to make the viewer feel part of that space. Even if the viewer isn't American or was born too late to live through the late 1950s or hasn't grown up on a diet of gangster films, there is still throughout these photographs an odd sense of familiarity that seems to reach out. That's a testament to the skills with which Gordon Parks wielded his camera, that he invites what we can only presume to be a predominantly middle white class audience into a world that they think they know, but he's about to totally destroy their preconceptions. Sitting down in the den, possibly with an old fashioned to hand and dreaming of buying a new Edsel leaping through the pages of Life magazine, there is an article on crime in the US. The photography is interesting. It's reminiscent of that film that was at the movie house last week. But something in them sits uneasy inside us. On closer inspection, the people in those photographs aren't who we expect to see. For one thing, the majority of them look sort of familiar. Like somebody we would see at the local Chamber of Commerce or a Rotary Club meeting. That penny dropping is the second step in Gordon Parks, gently introducing the idea of change into the viewer's mind. Given Parks' first hand experiences, he wants to make a difference to share the story of these people, not to reinforce but to challenge stereotypes. Their overall feeling that comes through these photographs when going beyond their aesthetic is that Parks is trying to shine light on how threatening and violent the police can appear to the people on the fringes of society in the urban poor. It's such a far cry from the sheltered suburban world of the Life magazine reader. The scene of officers kicking down a door, guns in hand, creates a feeling or an idea that this behavior wasn't the last resort but it was the first step taken. That such action should be visited on you just because of where you live. Invite ideas that are comfortable, especially in today's world. When looking at these photographs, especially when compared to some others in Parks' career, it's not the photography itself that draws us in. A great number of the images of their blurry, their out of focus and their blinded with flash but in a way, their very rawness leads them an impact that would be diminished by having technical perfection. The world and this world of night and shadow, violence and crime is far from perfect. There are photographers whose images feed our eyes and then there are photographers like Gordon Parks whose photography is used as a tool for change both morally and socially. The greatest of tools in Parks is Arsenal and the third step in drawing you in is empathy. It'll be too easy to fall into gross generalizations and caricature when photographing crime with a capital C. When you look at the photography parks created in his career, there is always empathy. It's quiet and it's unassuming. His own upbringing in Kansas where he experienced first hand suffering, racial injustice and the struggles of those marginalized bred in him both a clarity of message and an empathy for whom he sought to champion and share their stories. Because pictures that I made that I have become the most important pictures were pictures that I wish that I never had to take with people who impoverished people in need and I suppose that I pointed my camera at people mostly who needed someone to say something for them and who couldn't speak for themselves. So you take a picture of a little Brazilian boy or a picture of a kitten Harlem who was in need. It may have been turned out to be the best picture but it wasn't a picture that I really or considered something that I would like to have taken. I hated taking it but I had to do it. By photographing his subjects with empathy he makes them human. He makes them people. People who had circumstances just been a little bit different would have been just like us. It's a great skill to be able to go on one hand to create a powerful social message and yet still never forget to have respect and empathy for those whom you're photographing. Having a better understanding of these three aspects of Gordon Parks's photography will now give you a better appreciation of his work and every other documentary photography whom you see. Not every photograph is laced through with meaning. Some of the chorus while others are the solo. But when you put a number of Gordon Parks's images together much like a piece of music the song that they create is rich and vibrant. The great number of people who view his photography today could never conceive the experiences he and those whom he photographed went through. He was an accomplished photographer and the images here barely scratched the surface of his abilities and I would encourage you to seek out and digest more of his fantastic photography. Thank you ever so much for joining me today.