LIFE Magazine - March 8, 1968
CONDITION:
The cover has light general storage wear...Inner pages are in very good used condition!
The Core Story: A Harlem Family by Gordon Parks
The central and most impactful piece was a 16-page photo essay, "A Harlem Family" (sometimes titled "The Cycle of Despair"), created by famed Black photographer, writer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks. Parks, who was a staff photographer for LIFE, photographed and wrote the text about the lives of the Fontenelles, an impoverished Black family living in a tenement in Harlem, New York.
• The Cover Image: The magazine cover itself featured a striking, emotional portrait by Parks of one of the Fontenelle children, Ellen, with her eyes closed and a single tear on her cheek, powerfully embodying "The Cry That Will Be Heard."
• A Look Inside: The essay chronicled the family’s daily struggle against systemic challenges, providing a raw look at their living conditions. The photographs and text highlighted the struggles with:
o Poverty and Hunger: One annotation describes an image of a young child in distress due to hunger and unclean living conditions.
o Substandard Housing: Images detailed the crumbling walls, the family huddling for warmth under a blanket because the heat was out, and how they managed household chores like washing clothes in the shared bathtub.
o The Cycle of Despair: The story humanized the family, moving beyond stereotypes. For example, the father, Norman Fontenelle, was shown not as simply unemployed, but as a man who was laid off and actively being denied employment due to his race.
o Social Commentary: Parks used the family to critique American injustice, including appropriating and inverting images of the "American Dream" to contrast the reality of the Fontenelle's limited, indoor existence with the myth of unbounded opportunity.
