An expansive look at one of the greatest American photo series.

Gordon Parks’ 1942 portrait of government worker Ella Watson, American Gothic, is among the most celebrated photographs of the 20th century. The photograph not only connects the intimacy of one person’s life with a national state of affairs but also engages with a larger history of American images by referring to and reinterpreting Grant Wood’s celebrated 1930 painting of the same name. 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’ visual reckoning with the realities of living in racially segregated Washington, D.C. Hardcover, 192 pages.