What’s Your American Dream?

Photographer Gordon Parks met Ella Watson, an African American charwoman, in 1942, when she was busy sweeping the office where he worked for the Farm Security Administration in Washington, D.C. Parks was the only black artist to work for the program’s legendary photo department; he was dispatched by the agency to document the plight of America’s impoverished rural communities, as well as the work the FSA was doing to alleviate it.

“Good evening, young man,” Parks recalled Watson saying in his 2005 memoir, A Hungry Heart. “You’re new around here.” Parks had just moved to D.C. from Chicago, where he had been doing odd jobs—most recently as a waiter in a railway dining car—while teaching himself photography. Born in 1912 in Scott, Kansas, as the youngest of 15 children, Parks grew up in poverty himself. “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,” he said in a 1983 interview.

In 1942, Parks mounted a show at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago. In attendance was Jack Delano, a staff photographer for the FSA, who encouraged Parks to apply for a year-long fellowship at the agency. The head of the photo program, Roy Stryker, accepted Parks—with reservations: he had doubts a black photographer could succeed in Washington, D.C., a city where racism and segregation were entrenched.

Stryker devised a kind of trial-by-fire, dispatching the photographer to run a few seemingly random errands: he told Parks to go get a meal, see a movie, and buy a coat. The restaurant, movie theater, and department store all refused Parks’s business—they would not serve blacks. Disgusted, the photographer returned to the office to get his cameras. “I want to show the rest of the world what your great city of Washington, D.C., is really like,” he told Stryker.

Parks met Watson a few months into his stint with the FSA. “How do you like Washington?” he asked her. “Can’t say I’m loving it,” she told him. “But I’m muddling through.” They chatted about her life. Watson told Parks that her father had been lynched by Southern mobsters, that her mother had died young, and her husband had been shot to death just days before the birth of their daughter. Now she was living with her granddaughter and helping to raise her children. She had worked for the government for 25 years. “By comparison my experiences were akin to a peaceful afternoon,” he wrote in A Hungry Heart. He asked Watson’s permission to take her photograph.

Parks posed Watson in front of a large American flag that hung in the FSA office. He had her hold her mop in one hand and her broom in the other, and asked her to think about the difficult things she had just shared with him. Watson’s mouth is set in a firm line, and she gazes directly into the camera lens. The pose was a deliberate reference to Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic, which depicts a stern, white, midwestern couple. The pair’s resolute and unpretentious character, combined with an air of hard work, inspired many to think of this couple as “Mr. and Mrs. American,” as one art historian put it.

Here, Parks presented an alternative image of an American: a widowed black woman who cleaned up after the mostly white employees of a government office in a deeply segregated city. A hard worker who provided for her family, she did not have the same opportunities as the unsmiling couple in Wood’s painting to achieve the American dream of security and wealth. Parks also titled his photo American Gothic.

When Parks showed Stryker the photo, the program head balked. (“My god, this can’t be published,” Parks recalled his boss saying.) But he encouraged Parks to continue photographing Watson. Eventually Parks produced a photo essay about her life, taking pictures of her at home and at church. However, it was this first portrait that became his most frequently referenced work, after Parks temporarily snuck it out of the FSA offices and submitted it to a Brooklyn newspaper, which published it.

“There were some politicians who objected to American Gothic finding a place in the FSA files,” Parks wrote in A Hungry Heart. “One Southern congressman snarled his opinion: ‘It amounts to an indictment of America.’ Perhaps he was right. Some photographs are often accused of telling the truth.”