Campus News

UGA Libraries to host conversation about civil rights photographer Gordon Parks

Billy Weeks, a two-time winner of the Gordon Parks International Photography award, will speak about Parks Feb. 16 at 2:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries.

Parks, who died in 2006, was the first African-American staff member for Life magazine, where he covered the civil rights movement for two decades. He also distinguished himself in fashion photography and later as a filmmaker.

Weeks’ talk complements an exhibit of photographs from a 1956 Life magazine photo essay on segregation in the South on view in the Hargrett Library Gallery in the Russell Building through March 31. The Hargrett exhibit is one of a series of exhibitions installed around Athens under the umbrella Pictures of Us: Photographs from The Do Good Fund Collection, which is part of the Global Georgia Initiative of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.