Empathy for the poor may not come easily to people who never experienced poverty. They may blame the victims and insist their predicament can be overcome through determination and hard work. But they may not realize that extreme poverty can be psychologically and physically incapacitating — a perpetual cycle of bad diets, health care and education exacerbated by the shaming and self-fulfilling prophecies that define it in the public imagination.

Gordon Parks — perhaps more than any artist — saw poverty as “the most savage of all human afflictions” and realized the power of empathy to help us understand it. It was neither an abstract problem nor political symbol, but something he endured growing up destitute in rural Kansas and having spent years documenting poverty throughout the world, including the United States.

That sensitivity informed “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” his celebrated photo essay published in Life magazine in June 1961. He took readers into the lives of a Brazilian boy, Flavio da Silva, and his family, who lived in the ramshackle Catacumba favela in the hills outside Rio de Janeiro. These stark photographs are the subject of a new book, “Gordon Parks: The Flavio Story” (Steidl/The Gordon Parks Foundation), which accompanies a traveling exhibition co-organized by the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, where it opens this week, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Edited with texts by the exhibition’s co-curators, Paul Roth and Amanda Maddox, the book also includes a recent interview with Mr. da Silva and essays by Beatriz Jaguaribe, Maria Alice Rezende de Carvalho and Sérgio Burgi.