In her book “On Photography,” Susan Sontag writes, “there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” “Bare Witness,” Cantor’s new exhibit of 73 black-and-white works by recently deceased photographer, novelist and film director Gordon Parks, is a reminder that even Sontag was fallible. Many of these outstanding photographs chronicle poverty and slum life in various cities. These photographs never try to elicit a specific emotional response from the viewer by strong-arming him into feeling pity. Instead, Parks used his lens to explore exactly how his subjects see themselves— not exclusively as sympathy-inducing victims of impoverishment, but as human beings with complex psychologies that have been shaped by their harsh realities. The genius of these photographs is that they resist portraying even their most destitute subjects as victims of the camera or of their surroundings. Without simplifying his subjects or diminishing the poignancy of the specific moment, Parks captured lives shaped by the rapidly shifting social forces of a postwar America and thus portrayed history in its most human form.

Gordon Parks is perhaps most-acclaimed for his photography but was a versatile artist, spawning the Blaxploitation genre with his 1971 movie “Shaft,” publishing novels and poetry and composing a ballet about Martin Luther King, Jr. He was also an author and a musician. The youngest of 15 children, Parks was born into poverty in Fort Scott, Kan. in 1912. He began his photography career as a woman’s portrait photographer, then started to photograph Chicago’s poor and Black South Side. These photographs landed him a job with the Farm Security Administration, where he photographed under the supervision of the head of the FSA’s Information Division, Roy Striker. Perhaps his most recognizable photograph—and the first one the viewer encounters in the main room of the Cantor exhibit— depicts Ella Watson, a black janitor at the Farm Security Administration building, standing in front of an American flag with a broom in hand and a mop in the background. The photograph is called “American Gothic, Washington, D.C.,” titled after the famous Grant Wood painting of the same name. The American flag hovers out of focus in the background, an allegory for that which hovered above African Americans as they struggled against racism and other workers as they strove to make a living in America.

It was his relationship with Striker that led him to work on the Standard Oil Photography Project in the mid ’40s photographing life in small towns and industrial centers. Some photographs from the project included in the exhibit—such as an image of a young grease-plant worker, looking determined despite the nightmarish setting of the plant—show the tentative hope and doubt of people caught in the industrial thrust of the nation. On the other hand, others show the encroachment of mass culture into small towns. The aforementioned photographs chronicling slum life that are the soul of the exhibit, however, are selections from photo essays that Parks published in Life magazine. In one series, Parks captures the life of a young Brazilian boy, Flavio da Silva, and his siblings growing up in a squalid favela in Rio de Janero. These beautiful and affecting images capture the physical conditions of people’s impoverished lives, yet they are intensely personal and psychological. Parks engages with the subject’s mental state at the moment his lens captures them. In his high-contrast style, he draws the viewer to the subject and the subject’s humanity as something distinct from the peeling walls, the dirty pits and the tenements that surround them.

These photo essays are being displayed as high art, which speaks to Parks’ versatility as a photographer. Even his most affecting photographs, such as those of Flavio tenderly feeding his younger brother are beautifully composed images. Struck initially by the photographs from magazines that riders would leave behind while working as a waiter on a luxury train car, Parks went on to have a strong career as a freelance fashion photographer and worked for Vogue. Regrettably, the exhibit includes only one of his fashion photographs.

A second, lighter room houses Parks’ portraits of famous artists and historical figures. Again we see his predilection for photographing his subjects in dramatic lighting, often streaming in from one side. He captured his artist subjects in their natural setting: Duke Ellington playing piano, Leonard Bernstein in Carnegie Hall, Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder surrounded by their art. Also in the room are photographs of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and members of the Black Panthers. Two photographs—the 1977 photograph of prominent Black Panther member Edridge Cleaver and his wife Kathleen in front of a portrait of Panthers co-founder Huey Newton, and a 1949 photograph of Ingrid Bergman in Stramboli, dressed in white and glancing loftily to the side while three black-clad old women in the background gawk at her—exemplify once more how good Parks’ skill at using his camera to connect with his subject’s psyche.

“Bare Witness” may not be as accessible as the Richard Avedon photographs downstairs, but they are certainly just as resounding and important. By forcing the viewer to focus not only on the subjects’ characters but also on their situations, Parks’ photographs transcend time and space while at the same time conveying a historical moment. The exhibit runs from now until July 1 at Cantor Arts Center.