One important note about the headline’s musical connection: Gordon Parks directed Shaft, but Isaac Hayes composed its celebrated score. Parks did compose the score for his own film, The Learning Tree.

A photograph can hold a moment still. But what happens when the people inside that image get the chance to speak back?

At Jack Shainman Gallery in Tribeca, Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror returns to photographs we may think we know and invites us to encounter them anew. The exhibition pairs Parks’s images with reflections from the people he photographed and, in some cases, their families. Their memories bring new intimacy and context to work that has shaped how generations see Black life, history and beauty.

The show marks the 20th anniversary of The Gordon Parks Foundation. It is on view at 46 Lafayette Street, New York, through November 6, 2026, according to the gallery’s exhibition page. With only days left, this is a moment to make the visit if you can.

The people in the pictures speak

Parks was known for looking beyond the surface. In Voices in the Mirror, that attentiveness comes into sharper focus through recollections from people whose lives crossed his lens. The photographs are not presented as distant historical documents; they become the beginning of a conversation across time.

Among the contributors is Cora Taylor, reflecting on Parks’s 1956 Life magazine photograph At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama. The image belongs to his landmark series documenting the everyday realities of Black Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the rural South. Taylor recalled being present for the photograph and seeing it later in Life. Her perspective adds a human dimension to an image long regarded as part of the visual record of segregation.

That shift matters. We are invited to consider not only what the camera captured, but what it felt like to be there: the uncertainty, the awareness of danger, the small decisions people had to make in an unjust world. The photograph remains powerful; the subject’s own memory makes its meaning more layered.

Other reflections bring fresh insight to images connected to the families of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, among others. The result is not a replacement for Parks’s vision, but a fuller encounter with it: one shaped by the people who knew the moments from the inside.

A career that moved between image and sound

Parks’s creative life never belonged to one medium. He was a photographer, writer, filmmaker, composer and musician, moving between forms with a fluency that feels especially at home in a city’s cultural rhythm.

In 1948, Parks became the first Black staff photographer at Life magazine. Over the following decades, he made portraits and photo essays that brought attention to people and stories too often overlooked. His work could be intimate and unsparing, but it also carried a deep respect for his subjects’ humanity.

Film offered another way to tell stories. Parks wrote, directed and composed the score for The Learning Tree (1969), adapting his autobiographical novel for the screen. The film marked a major milestone: Parks was the first African American to write and direct a major Hollywood studio feature. The Gordon Parks Foundation’s film archive offers more on his work across cinema.

And then there is Shaft. Parks directed the 1971 film, helping bring its stylish, streetwise world to the screen. But its unmistakable score was composed and performed by Isaac Hayes. The distinction matters, and it makes the music-and-photography connection no less compelling. Parks understood how sound, image and mood could work together to tell a story. His own work on The Learning Tree demonstrates that directly.

Looking closely, listening differently

There is a musical quality to the way this exhibition asks us to pay attention. A photograph offers a frame; a subject’s reflection opens a new passage beyond it. One voice brings forward a detail, another adds a memory, and the image begins to resonate differently. Like a well-arranged record, the experience rewards a second listen.

That is one reason Parks feels so relevant to a place like The Funk Jazz Lounge, where music, poetry, art and culture belong in the same conversation. A photograph can have rhythm. A written recollection can feel like a verse. And a song can change how we see the scene around us.

Parks’s work also reminds us that art is not only about the person behind the camera. It is about the exchange between photographer and subject: the trust, the attention, and the moments that continue to live after the shutter closes. In Voices in the Mirror, those moments are still unfolding.

The exhibition’s title comes from Parks’s final memoir, published in 1990. It feels apt here. A mirror does not simply reflect; it asks us to look again, and to notice who is looking back.

A closing-week invitation

If you are in New York, consider making time for the show before it closes. The exhibition is at Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, Tribeca, and the gallery lists its final day as November 6. Check the official exhibition page for current visitor information before you go.

Take your time with the photographs. Read the reflections. Let a subject’s words alter what you thought you knew about an image. The pleasure is not in rushing from one frame to the next, but in allowing the work to meet you at its own pace.

And when you leave, carry that attentive mood with you. Tune in to The Funk Jazz Lounge’s 24/7 stream for a soundtrack where soul, Neo Soul, jazz, poetry and culture share the room. Like Parks’s art, the best listening rewards curiosity, and leaves you with more to consider after the final note.