summary part 5

Over the next few years, Parks moved from job to job, developing a freelance portrait and fashion photographer sideline. He began to chronicle the city's South Side black ghetto and in 1941 an exhibition of those photographs won Parks a photography fellowship with the farm security administration. Working as a trainee under Roy Stryker. Parks created one of his best known photographs, American Gothic, Washington, D.C. (named after grant woods painting .The photo shows a black woman, Ella Watson, who worked on the cleaning crew for the FSA building, standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a broom in one hand and a mop in the background. Parks had been inspired to create the picture after encountering repeated racism restaurants and shops, following his arrival in Washington upon viewing it, Stryker said that it was an indictment of America, and could get all of his photographers fired; he urged Parks to keep working with Watson, however, leading to a series of photos of her daily life. Parks, himself, said later that the first image was unsubtle and overdone; nonetheless, other commentators have argued that it drew strength from its polemical nature and its duality of victim and survivor, and so has affected far more people than his subsequent pictures of Watson

After the FSA disbanded, Parks remained in Washington as a correspondent with the office of administration, but became disgusted with the prejudice he encountered and resigned in 1944. Moving to Harlem Parks became a freelance fashion photographer for vogue He later followed Stryker to the standard oil (New Jersey