Fresh from assignments at Vogue and Glamour in 1948, Gordon Parks appeared one morning at Life’s New York headquarters, determined to show his portfolio to Wilson Hicks, the magazine’s esteemed picture editor. Mr. Hicks was initially reluctant, but he warmed to Mr. Parks’s work and the story he pitched about the gang warfare then plaguing Harlem.

That meeting resulted in two milestones: The photo essay Mr. Hicks commissioned, “Harlem Gang Leader,” would be Life’s first by a black photographer, and the first of many for the magazine by Mr. Parks. The project is the subject of an exhibition, “Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument,” at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Organized by Russell Lord for the New Orleans Museum of Art, the exhibition tracks the conception, execution and editing of that photo essay. It examines the published article in relation to the hundreds of negatives, proof prints, contact sheets and editorial notes from the archives of the Gordon Parks Foundation. Documenting complex editorial decisions and practices, it exposes the usually private negotiations between photographer and photo editors and art directors.

“The Making of an Argument” is an illuminating exercise in visual and racial literacy, investigating how words and images communicate multifaceted realities, convey points of view and biases, and sway or manipulate meaning. As the hundreds of photographs taken for the story were whittled down to the few published in Life, the editorial selection process, as Mr. Lord noted in his catalog essay, raised questions about authorship and meaning: “What was the intended argument? And whose argument was it?”

To get his story, Mr. Parks gained the trust of the Midtowners gang and its 17-year old leader, Leonard Jackson, who was known as Red. In the time he spent with Mr. Jackson, Mr. Parks became “a welcome companion in all of [his] activities, including diplomatic sessions with other gangs, fights, quiet moments at home, even a visit to a funeral chapel to examine the wounds of a deceased member of a friendly gang.”

Mr. Parks hoped that the photo essay, by drawing attention to a serious social problem, might encourage programs to help endangered youth. But the range of images he took for the article, in contrast to those that made it into the magazine, suggest that his conception of the project differed considerably from his editors’. While Mr. Parks would become an important and influential staff photographer at Life, “Harlem Gang Leader” was his pilot project. Thus, as Mr. Lord wrote, “the decisions made in producing the photo-essay were most likely exclusively those of editors and staff at Life.”

Photo

If the magazine’s aim in publishing it was to inform its readers about a pressing social dilemma — and boost sales through dramatic and controversial images — it did so by perpetuating stereotypes. While the photo essay focused on a community beset by racism and poverty, its view of Harlem was narrow, a foreboding and stifling cityscape shrouded in mist and shadows.

During the editorial process, photographs were aggressively cropped and manipulated, often to complement the article’s graphic layout. In one photograph, Life’s editors, intent on creating a dramatic picture of Mr. Jackson and a friend viewing the open coffin of fallen gang member, cropped out a third teenager and darkened the distracting background.

Life’s editors largely dismissed many photographs that focused on the more affirmative events and rituals of everyday life. While he recorded the violence and aggression of the Midtowners, Mr. Lord said, Mr. Parks “made just as many pictures of intimate moments of quiet domesticity and boisterous, carefree Harlem street life.”

Photographs of Mr. Jackson’s brother reading, for example, were rejected for publication, and the words “Red’s young brother/not gangster” were bluntly scrawled on their contact sheet. Images of children frolicking around an open fire hydrant or of Mr. Jackson attending to domestic chores were similarly excluded.

For Mr. Parks, such images would have portrayed the complexity and subtleties of Mr. Jackson’s story, and of Harlem, a neighborhood typically depicted in the mainstream press as lurid and dangerous. Rather than one-dimensional characters, the photo essay’s subjects were multifaceted human beings, capable of responsibility, love and generosity, but also driven to violence, an understandable, if self-destructive, response to poverty and racism.

By demonstrating the fullness and complexity of its subjects’ existence, the photo essay could have helped the magazine’s white readers to make connections to their own lives, an empathetic response that Mr. Parks believed was vital to challenging stereotypes and misconceptions about people they saw as fundamentally different from themselves.

In the end, Mr. Jackson was dismayed by the photo essay’s portrayal of him as a slick gangster, living a fundamentally unhappy and lawless life. “Damn, Mr. Parks, you made a criminal out of me,” the photographer recalled him saying after the essay was published. “I look like Bogart and Cagney all mixed up together.”

Photo

In the exhibition’s moving coda, photographs by Lyric Cabral depict Mr. Jackson, stooped and frail, 59 years later. In one image, a great-nephew steadies him as he enters an emergency room. In another, a barber trims his now-gray hair. Ms. Cabral’s poignant images of Mr. Jackson, who died in 2010, bear little resemblance to the teenager depicted in Life.

“They remind us of the other Red Jackson,” wrote Mr. Lord, “not the one so prominently displayed in the pages of Life, but the one who scrubbed the floor, washed the dishes, carried and entertained neighborhood children at parades, and cracked open the fire hydrant on hot days. This was the Red Jackson Life’s readers would not have a chance to know. This was the Red Jackson Gordon Parks knew.”

Follow @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram.