The Red Jackson photograph by Gordon Parks sent me into a whirlwind of reactions from the first time I saw it. Encountering this black and white masterpiece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art feels like a lucky break at first. It’s a thoughtful photographic version of a Vermeer that’s still fresh today, even though it’s from 1948. Podcast version of this post. When Parks took this picture he was working on a feature for Life magazine as a social documentarian. It was a piece about gangs in Harlem […]