In January 1944, at the height of World War II, Gordon Parks traveled to Maine, on assignment for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) (SONJ) to document its contributions to the war effort and capture life on the American home front during this crucial period. Parks’s photographs chronicled oil and gas facilities and workers, Esso station owners in small towns, and the people whose livelihoods depended on SONJ products like fuel and oil. His travels led him to Somerville, where he met Herklas Brown, the owner of the town’s general store and Esso gas station.* Consistent with his work before and after he joined Life magazine in 1948, Parks made it his mission to get to know his subjects and portray their humanity, photographing Brown at his Esso station, inside his store, and with his family at the dinner table.
The book Gordon Parks: Herklas Brown and Maine, 1944, accompanying an exhibition by the same name at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 2025, chronicles Parks’s journey through Maine during the winter and summer months. The images included in this publication, many never-before-seen, show how Parks—traveling alone as a Black man in an era of rationing and scarce transportation, food, and lodging—nevertheless produced a powerful photographic record of rural America. It was his encounter with Herklas Brown and his family in winter 1944, however, that provides the most insightful window into Parks’s time in Maine and this pivotal moment in American history. As both Frank H. Goodyear III and Carrie Mae Weems elaborate in their essays, there is one image in particular of the Brown family that reveals Parks’s extraordinary career-long approach to his subjects and American society. In his essay, “Gordon parks’s Winter in Maine,” Frank H. Goodyear III explains:
Gordon Parks, Storefront, Somerville, Maine, 1944
Gordon Parks, Suppertime, Somerville, Maine. February 1944
"Supper was the one time of day when the Brown family was all together. One evening Parks asked to photograph the table with the entire family and Harold. He made two photographs of this scene. The differences between the two are minor but noteworthy. In the first, Blanche holds Marie in her lap and feeds her with a spoon. Seated next to her, Vera holds a plate of food, as Herklas reaches into a bowl with a serving utensil. No food has yet been placed on the plates in front of Marion and Hazel…
In the second image, a plate full of food rests on the table at an empty seat—most likely where Parks was meant to sit after he had completed his work. Blanche no longer holds Marie, who has been passed across the table and now sits in her grandmother’s lap. All except Parks are busily eating. It was this version of the photograph that SONJ made available for use. Why one was preferable over the other is not known. What both photographs do reveal is the deliberate nature of Parks’s practice. Knowing how special it was to have the entire family around the same table and how resonant such a scene might be, given the religious and historical associations related to scenes of dinner, he created a second image—one in which his own presence at the table is suggested.
Parks demonstrated a high visual literacy throughout his photographic career. He recognized the compositional strategies other artists employed, and he created images that benefited from that knowledge. In constructing these two dinner table photographs, might Parks have had in mind Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, a painting of a family Thanksgiving dinner reproduced the previous year to great acclaim in The Saturday Evening Post? Or his own photographs taken in 1942 in Washington, D.C., one of a family seated at dinner at the Frederick Douglass Housing Project, the other of a Thanksgiving meal at the home of the president of Howard University? Literature and later cinema also shaped his thinking. Indeed, to what degree were these two photographs responding as well to the restaurant scene in Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, in which the Black protagonist, Bigger Thomas, sits uncomfortably at a meal with two young white adults whom he is chauffeuring?19 Parks’s two dinner table photographs in Maine brought forward elements from each of these examples. They combine the sense of family joy evident in Rockwell’s painting, the sanctity of the image from Washington, D.C., and the not-so-subtle racial differences that Wright described in his novel."
Indeed, the dinner table figures prominently throughout art history. One such example is Carrie Mae Weem’s Kitchen Table Series (1990), which positions the kitchen table as a central site of family and social dynamics. In the series, Weems explores the complexities of identity, relationships, and power within Black womanhood. In her essay for Herklas Brown and Maine, “The Table,” Weems offers a parallel interpretation of the photograph of the Brown dinner table, the empty seat and full plate depicted, and Parks’s own role within the image:
"The unintended result was that Parks, being who he was and knowing what he knew, brought to the table a genuine compassion and expansive humanity that enabled him to forge an abiding connection with the Browns that continued for several years, going far beyond the narrow-minded constraints of public relations. Even in low light, the common bond of fellowship, dignity, and grace can be witnessed in the photograph. Photographs have the unique ability to teach us about ourselves and about one another, and in this way, Parks finds a place for himself at the table, and the humility of the Browns finds a place in our hearts."
Gordon Parks, Hercules Brown and His Family at Supper, Somerville, Maine, 1944
Mr. Herklas Brown, his wife and family and Gordon Parks, photographer, who made the pictures for the Standard Oil Company
Texts are excerpted from essays by Frank H. Goodyear III, co-director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and artist Carrie Mae Weems in Gordon Parks: Herklas Brown and Maine, 1944, published by The Gordon Parks Foundation, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Steidl.
*Herklas Brown was born Calvin H. Brown. Parks and SONJ recorded his first name as “Hercules,” and he has been regularly identified as such. Except for any documentation as given by Parks and SONJ, he is identified as Herklas.
Gordon Parks, Hercules Brown, Somerville, Maine, 1944
Gordon Parks, Hercules Brown, Somerville, Maine, 1944
