On 8 March 1968, Life magazine published “A Harlem Family,” Gordon Parks’s account, in photographs and text, of the Fontenelles, a family living in poverty in Harlem. Parks did not arrive as a stranger to the household; he spent time with the family before making pictures, and the essay that resulted reads as an unusually direct document of American poverty for a mass-circulation magazine.

“Diary of a Harlem Family 1967/1968,” published by Steidl in 2026, returns to that assignment and treats it as a turning point in Parks’s life — the project that helped move him toward film. Since a 2012 volume devoted to the photo essay, further images from the series have come to light, and the companion film Parks made the same year, “Diary of a Harlem Family” (1968), has been examined more closely. The book sets that revised understanding beside material not previously published: correspondence and papers Parks gathered through years of keeping in touch with the Fontenelles, letters from Life readers responding to the story, and the transcript of his conversation with Michael Torosian about how the work was made.

Four essays frame the sequence — by Thelma Golden, Cord Jefferson, Leigh Raiford and Michael Boyce Gillespie — while the photographs remain entirely Parks’s. The volume runs to roughly 270 pages in a large format suited to a picture essay whose charge depends on sequence and scale.

What makes the book worth a collector’s attention is not scarcity but the completeness of its reconsideration. The Harlem photographs are among the most discussed in American photojournalism, yet the record around them — reader response, the family’s later contact with Parks, the film — has stayed largely out of print. Publishing to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Gordon Parks Foundation, this expanded study lets the pictures and their documentary aftermath be read as one body of evidence about how a magazine story was made, received and remembered.