A new exhibition, Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror, marks the 20th anniversary of the Gordon Parks Foundation by celebrating Parks’s photography and wider artistic legacy. People who knew him, including relatives of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X and prominent artists and activists, describe how his images revealed the humanity of his subjects and continue to connect with audiences across generations.

The article highlights Parks’s intimate 1966 photographs of Muhammad Ali, which showed the boxer’s reflective and vulnerable side, as well as his groundbreaking film The Learning Tree, the first major Hollywood studio film directed, produced and scored by a Black director. It also explores Parks’s belief that his work represented the wider experiences of Black Americans, alongside his inventive still-life and abstract imagery, such as photographs featuring a leaf that appears almost human.