American Gothic, Washington, D.C.

African American photographer Gordon Parks spent his youth in Minnesota and later became prominent in documentary journalism from the 1940s through 1970s, focusing on issues of civil rights and poverty. A year-long fellowship with the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration in 1942 supported his work documenting black lives in Washington, D.C. He later said of this photograph, a portrait of government cleaning woman Ella Watson: “I had experienced a kind of bigotry and discrimination here that I never expected to experience. . . . At first, I asked [Ella Watson] about her life, what it was like, and [it was] 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.”