American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson

"At first, I asked her about her life, what it was like, and so disastrous that I felt that I must photograph this woman in a way that would make me feel or make the public feel about what Washington D.C., was in 1942. So I put her before the American flag with a broom in one hand and a mop in another. And I said, "American Gothic"—that's how I felt at the moment. I didn't care about what anybody else felt. That's what I felt about America and Ella Watson's position inside America." –Gordon Parks, 1998. Gordon Parks’s 1942 portrait of government worker Ella Watson, which he famously titled American Gothic, is among the most celebrated and influential photographs of the 20th century. Created as part of an extensive collaboration between the photographer and his subject, it is at once a record of one woman’s position within the racial, professional, and economic hierarchies that stratified the nation’s capital and Parks’s visual reckoning with the realities of Black life in racially segr