(PHOTOGRAPHY) PARKS GORDON The Fontanelle Family

Sale 2105 - Lot 320

Price Realized: $ 1,680

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500

(PHOTOGRAPHY.) PARKS, GORDON. The Fontanelle Family. Silver print, 11x14 inches, matted and framed. Small label on the back identifying the piece. Not signed but Parks's own copy, which hung in his office at home. New York, 1968

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The Fontanelle Family; Bessie and Kenneth, Little Richard, Norman Jr. and Ellen at the Poverty Board in New York City, 1967. The Story of the Fontanelles was tragic in the extreme. "It was difficult," Parks said of this. "The husband was unemployed, the family had no food, it was wintertime but the kids couldn't attend school because they had no winter clothes. And it was difficult not to immediately, being in my position, take money in, take food in, to ease their situation. Because the minute you do that you've lost your story. So you pray and hope that you can get your story over as quickly as possible, and that there will be a response from the public." Which is what happened, but before money poured in from the public, Parks had to stand back and watch the family suffer. With the funds LIFE and its readers contributed to the Fontanelles, a small house was bought on Long Island as a refuge for the family from the filth and chaos of the Harlem tenement. Three months after they moved in, the father [drunk at the time] burned down the house by dropping a lit cigarette on the family's new sofa. "The father died in the fire, little Kenneth, one of my favorites, died in the fire. Little Norman died mysteriously two years later, the other girl [sucking her thumb in the image shown here] died from AIDS, as did two of her sisters. The whole family was destroyed," Parks observed.