Time & Perspective Quote by Gordon Parks

Parks is talking like someone who knows the camera is not just a mirror but a time machine with an agenda. In the 1930s, America was busy mythmaking its way through the Depression: toughness, thrift, a national “we” that conveniently blurred who got left out. Parks insists that images from that era won’t merely illustrate history later; they will manufacture it. “People in millenniums ahead” is deliberate exaggeration, a sweeping future tense meant to raise the stakes and shame the present into paying attention.

The subtext is a quiet fight over authorship. If the record is dominated by official portraits and polished narratives, the decade becomes a story about institutions and heroic endurance. Parks, coming up as a Black photographer in a segregated country, understood how easily certain lives are treated as disposable details. His phrasing - “important major things that shaped our history” - sounds almost clumsy, but it’s doing work: broadening “history” beyond presidents and policy to the textures of survival, labor, hunger, migration, and the everyday violence of inequality.

Context matters here: the documentary tradition of the 1930s (the FSA, Depression-era photojournalism) positioned photography as public evidence. Parks is staking a claim that this evidence is not secondary to “real” events; it is part of the event. The line “as important...as any other” is a refusal of the hierarchy that treats art as decoration. For Parks, the photograph is a civic document - and a warning: the future will only know what we bothered to look at.