The Brooklyn Rail

Installed as a series of pairings rather than a linear chronology, A Language We Share: Beverly Price and Gordon Parks at the Center for Art and Advocacy Gallery, places images in quiet but deliberate conversation. The exhibition, marking twenty years since the death of Gordon Parks and twenty years since Beverly Price’s return home after incarceration, frames return as both legacy and re-entry. Parks, who moved his family to Washington, D.C. in 1942 after joining the Farm Security Administration, and Price, a native of Washington, D.C., whose work centers the Southeast Anacostia neighborhood and the Barry Farms community, each use photography to engage conditions that shape Black life—racism, economic inequality, incarceration—and forms of resistance and community that persist within and against them. The exhibition comprises thirty photographs, thirteen by Parks and seventeen by Price, organized into thirteen pairings, with additional works by Price extending several of these exchanges.

The relational logic is immediately apparent in the exhibition’s first pairing: Parks’s A dance group, Anacostia, D.C. Frederick Douglass Housing Project (1942) and Price’s Water Boys (2016). Standing between them, it becomes difficult to hold each image in isolation. In Parks’s photograph, young girls dressed as ballerinas move in loose formation, their gestures playfully choreographed, their motion edging toward the limits of the frame. In Price’s, two boys gather around a fire hydrant, water bursting outward in an unruly spray that seems to spill beyond the frame, creating a striking visual effect wherein the water appears to cross the threshold between images.

Elsewhere, the exhibition traces a shift in how subjects meet the camera. Parks’s Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama (1956) features three young girls facing the camera, their bodies surrounding a wooden chair, with gazes steady but attentive. It is paired with Price’s Long Live Baby K (2019), in which two boys lean casually against a fence, their memorial T-shirts anchoring the image in a history of loss. In both works, a trio of young people hold the frame, but Price’s figures are bound not only by arrangement but also by shared memory, a gesture that reconfigures portraiture itself, shifting it from mere documentation of living subjects to an assertion of those who are no longer there. Themes of inheritance carry into Price’s Black Boy (2021), whose title recalls Richard Wright’s memoir of the same name, situating the image within a larger narrative of Black boyhood. The young boy, dressed formally in a collared shirt and tie, looks directly at the photographer, his gaze steady and unflinching, a mirror behind him left unused. This image is paired with Parks’s Untitled, Harlem, New York (1948), where the young man adjusts his tie before a mirror, his gaze turned inward, transforming notions of visibility from something carefully composed to something inhabited.

The Atmosphere of Crime (1957) by Parks, capturing a hand holding a cigarette extending from a prison cell, appears beside Price’s Air (2018), an image of a leg fitted with an ankle monitor. In Parks’s photograph, the hand emerges from a dim interior, pressing against the boundary of the cell while Price’s subject is no longer inside the cell. The discreet but ever-present technology is strapped to the ankle above an Air Jordan sneaker, an emblem of movement and capital. Carceral logic persists here, creating a visual echo between the two.

Ultimately, the exhibition proposes a re-entry into visual language under altered conditions. Price re-enters using Parks’s language developed in the context of Jim Crow segregation and mid-century American life, allowing her images to reveal not just the persistence of carceral logics but their expansion beyond formal sites of confinement. The prison extends beyond its walls, reorganizing everyday space, relation, and memory. Yet Black life continues to exceed these shifting structures, gathering, improvising, and refusing containment. Across these pairings, specific visual elements begin to shift in meaning: the mirror becomes unnecessary; the dance becomes a spray of water; the gaze becomes reciprocal. In these pairings, images do not simply sit beside one another; they press against each other, leak into each other, and, at times, complete one another.