On December 5, opens to the public , at the Palazzo Incontro in Rome , the exhibition An American history, photographs of Gordon Parks, a project promoted by the Province of Rome and the Lazio Region, produced by Gordon Parks Foundation in New York in collaboration with the Fondazione Forma for Photography, organized by Contrasto and Civita.

"People who want to use a camera must have something in mind, there must be something you want to show, something they want to say."

Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks is a unique American storyteller, able with his camera and his ability to understand and dig into the folds of society, revealing the injustices and abuses, bring to light the history of those who had no voice to shout own history.

Among the most important photographers of the twentieth century, from the forties until his death, in 2006, Parks told the world, especially through the pages of the magazine Life , the difficulty of being black in a white world, segregation, poverty , prejudices, but also the great performers of the twentieth century,the worldfashion and even the great personalities of the rapidly-changing world, such as Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King.

Eclectic as ever ("Renaissance Man", was known even in the days of his collaboration with Life ), as well as photographer Parks was director, writer, musician, poet, and if his work defies easy classification, perhaps the key to understand better is that the narrator of the profession, the storyteller of the oral tradition that uses his own experience, lived and suffered, to make up stories.

Throughout his career, Gordon Parks tried to tell many stories, illustrating them with exemplary images. Stories of groups of people struggling to survive, small communities distant from the world, characters drifting or already in the spotlight but must be better understood than they are.

True or plausible, born from deep dramas, lived on his own skin of former black boy sentenced to die before birth or built in the alchemy of pure fiction, the stories of Gordon Parks are all authentic feel, all told as genuine visions and born the desire to affect reality, saying through the story in pictures their opinion and the need to shout it out loud to the world.

With more than 160 photographs, the exhibition, presented for the first time in spring 2013 Milan at the Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia, is the first major European retrospective dedicated to his work, to his profound poetry, its classical photography, powerful and deeply film.

The exhibition curated by Alessandra Mauro, is accompanied by a book published by Contrasto.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to celebrate the three years since the opening of the Palazzo Incontro that wanted with determination by the President Nicola Zingaretti, is the place where the Project ABC Beauty Art and Culture, created by the Province of Rome and Civita, It had its consecration. Today the building has become a trend that has expanded, qualifying it, the cultural capital of responding to stress and the expectations of an audience curious, curious, attentive, demanding, young and not at all usual for consumption and enjoyment of events.