Gordon Parks. Outside Looking In.

Gordon Parks

I am you . Selected Works . 1942 – 1978

Gordon Parks. Outside Looking In.  Mobile, Alabama, 1956

There is a whole world of difference between choosing to be an outsider and being forced to be. But what makes someone an outsider? This can be an abstract cultural kind of question; or a life or death consideration. My own experience is pretty banal. In Somerset, I was British, I was white, I worked, I had enough money. But I was also gay, had lived abroad and could speak more than one language. This alone was enough to make some people exclude me from conversations, whisper about me in corners and basically, reject me as an outsider who would never fit in.  Yet, even my outsider status in Somerset meant that in a way, I was an insider. I knew what I was dealing with, and I was choosing to exclude myself as well as suffering exclusion. It hurt, yet I was also glad not to fit in. Most people never have much of an option about being glad. Being an outsider often means death, physically or spiritually.
But being an outsider also has its points. Being an outsider and an artist, for example, means you have the chance to  draw people who are on "the inside" into your own world; you can try to bring the outside and the inside together.

Amerika-Haus (Photo: (c) David Becker)

This was brought home to me forcefully when I saw an exhibition at the Amerika-Haus, in what used to be the official US cultural and information centre in Berlin. It was the site of political protests and demonstrations as well as cultural exchange, but gradually fell into disuse as reunification proceeded and Americans withdrew more and more behind armoured guards and exclusion zones. But in the heady Cold War days, the Americans were right at the spiritual centre of West Berlin, right behind Zoo Station on Hardenbergstrasse, where two universities still live in happy proximity to glamourous West Berlin cafes that seem to have been there for ever and the drunken, mad or simply poor people that come to find shelter and soup at the Berlin Stadtmission. Gentrification is making inroads, but Zoo still remains comfortingly sleazy, busy and open to all comers – as it were. 

Now CO-Berlin is a house dedicated to art and if possible, political art. Going up the steps and pushing open the 1950s glass door, I went inside with a feeling of homecoming. To my left an art bookshop, to my right a cafe full of chattering students and hipsters and art enthusiasts of all ages. There was a sense of excitement in the air, probably linked to the European Month of Photography which just opened here. Or perhaps because of the stunning exhibition that they have managed to bring to Berlin, a retrospective of Gordon Parks' photographs. Gordon Parks was the first mainstream black photographer in America and used his photography and journalism to tell Americans shocking stories of what was happening in their country, from the 1940s to the late '70s. Glamourous, theatrical shots for Life and Vogue sit alongside stories of black gangs in Harlem and police brutality in Chicago, extreme poverty in Rio and New York and the scandal of segregation in Alabama. Parks did not only photograph the people he saw. He got to know them. He lived with them. Sometimes, this could cause them problems – the family who let him photograph them in the South were chased from their home after the report came out, and Parks (and his employer, Life magazine) had to step in to pay for their new life.

The fashion shots are placed almost at the heart of the exhibition, alongside a clip from a film showing police reprisals against black drug dealers. At first, I thought this unseemly; how can Vogue sit comfortably with violence? But of course, that's the point. While all of this violence, poverty and despair was going on, other (white, rich) people were continuing to live in a poetical, fantastical world of clothes, cars and cigars. I could draw a moral and say, Just as we do today. 

Gordon Parks. Shot for Life magazine, 1959.

But it's more complex than this. Those photographs of white fashion models, actors, brides and status symbols are also exhilarating in their own right. And with their beauty comes meaning. Even the photographs that were most clearly done for advertising purposes – the shots of the models in another Zoo, not in Berlin but in America, striped dresses set amongst the stripes of the zebra enclosure, a chirpy model in a white fur coat half-hiding the white fur of a polar bear – refer to a world beyond advertising. For those with eyes to see, they indicate the contradiction at the heart of the photographs. Humans are animals too, with passions, skin and fur. But humans are nothing like animals. Instead of natural dignity, we have trappings stolen from those very animals we are pretending to be like. Our freedom to wear luxurious clothing contrasts with the animals' imprisonment in cages they don't understand. And maybe too, we live in a zoo of our own making. What does Lou Reed say?

"Remember that the city is a funny place/Something like a circus or a zoo." 

I left the exhibition completely bowled over by what I had seen, with a sense that the meaning of the photographs was continuing to resonate in the city I was walking through. And I was grateful. Before seeing this exhibition, I was beginning to feel that Berlin has turned into a playground, its darkness confined to the safely past history embalmed in memorials, guided tours and books while in the present, young people from America or the UK come here to make the most of the liberal freedoms and cheap rents (compared to London or New York) that Berlin has to offer (just as I did); and to immerse themselves in the drama of another country's history as a way of accessing their own (just as I did too). Neo-Nazis have been burning down refugee homes, yet everywhere you go, people are at play: the vegan cafes, knitting circles, pop-up craft markets, baby yoga and English-speaking bars that seem to stretch the length of some streets in Neukölln or Prenzlauer Berg; the queues of Japanese tourists waiting to sample real German beer or real Turkish kebabs, authenticity created for smartphone cameras; the sense that whole districts are turning into nothing more than circuses or zoos places for tourists to escape to; I have had the sense that Berlin was slipping away from me. But don't I play too? Of course.

I ponder on why these things distress me. Is it my age? Probably? Envy? No, I don't think so.Maybe I envy people their energy and idealism, but I hope I still have a bit of that left, too. And anyway, lots of these things are good in themselves. These people are local, and they are doing something local; they are making things happen where they live, they are not part of big corporations, they are trying to make the world a more attentive, individual place. Good for them. But I mourn for something. Sometimes I have the sensation that this is play in a different sense too, playing like playing in the theatre, a way of pretending. Where is the passion about  German life today, where is the sense of taking part in actual, lived history now? I know it's there, and on a local level, lots of people are trying to make a difference, to the refugees who have come here in their thousands and to their own friends and families. But this exhibition did something else, too. It gave me back the belief that Berlin is still a part of the bigger world, still trying to make those connections between art and society, poverty then and poverty now.  It gave me a feeling of anger – righteous anger at what is happening all over the world and gratitude that some people still bear witness to it. And a feeling of hope. 

In fact, it wasn't boring at all.

Gordon Parks. American Gothic. 1942.