Parks' photo-essay "A Harlem Family", which was commissioned by Life magazine and published in March 1968 in an article titled "The Cycle of Despair: The Negro and the City". The publication was part of a special issue of Life focused on race and poverty in America. The Fontenelle family photographs – and the experience of taking them – compelled Parks to write a remarkable introductory text for the article, a desperate plea for the nation to set aside bigotry for a more hopeful future. Often referred to as a prose-poem, the text begins with the iconic headline: "What I want, what I am, what you force me to be, is what you are". The article remains one of the most famous examples of Parks using his camera as a tool for social justice.

Parks, as the only African American photographer on the magazine’s staff, was asked to explain why the nation’s inner cities were going up in flames. To Parks, the answer was obvious: racism and poverty. To bring these political and economic abstractions to life, he focused on the daily lives of a single, impoverished family, the Fontenelles, who lived in Harlem, New York. Parks wrote: “Pictures I’ve made that have become the most important pictures, were pictures that I wished I never had to take – of people who were impoverished, people in need – and I suppose that I pointed my camera mostly at people who needed someone to say something for them. They couldn’t speak for themselves.”

Parks spent a month with Norman and Bessie Fontenelle and their nine children in their cramped Harlem apartment. With winter approaching, British West Indies immigrant Norman Fontenelle, Sr., and his wife, Bessie, were falling short in their efforts to scrape together enough to feed their children. Jobless and frustrated, Norman Sr. would drink and then beat Bessie. With no food to offer, Bessie could not prevent her youngest child, three-year-old Richard, from eating the plaster that fell from the walls of their tiny dirt-covered apartment. The resulting series of photographs provide a searing portrait of poverty in the United States, offering a view of Harlem through the narrative of a specific family at a particular moment in time. The Fontenelle photos are perhaps Parks' most documentary in style, showing the harsh realities faced by the family.

The twenty-five images included in the Life magazine photo essay were spread over sixteen pages, printed in black and white. Their dark tones and shadows hinted at the subjectivity of Parks’ vision by refusing to reveal everything that he and his camera saw. His approach was never sentimental or dramatic, his depiction of the Fontenelles was intended to encourage empathy – the reader hopefully being provoked to see themselves in the photograph. As Parks wrote: "We are not so far apart as it might seem. There is something about both of us that goes deeper than blood or black and white. It is our common search for a better life, a better world. I march now over the same ground you once marched. I fight for the same things you still fight for. My children’s needs are the same as your children’s. I too am America. America is me. It gave me the only life I know – so I must share in its survival. Look at me. Listen to me. Try to understand my struggle against your racism. There is yet a chance for us to live in peace beneath these restless skies."

The family became the face of urban poverty for millions of Americans who responded to the article, donating enough money so that the family could leave Harlem and buy a house in Long Island. Sadly, the hope these changes offered the family was short-lived. There was a house fire, which resulted in the family having to relocate to Harlem. Richard, one of the eight Fontenelle children who appeared in a Harlem family, went on to have a stable family life and gave much of the credit for his success to his mother and Gordon Parks, who became a father figure to him.