Gordon Parks

Parks, Gordon (b. 1912), photographer, journalist, essayist, autobiographer, biographer, novelist, poet, film director, screenwriter, and composer. Gordon Parks's first two publications-Flash Photography (1947) and Camera Portraits: The Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948)-while written primarily for the professional photographer, reveal an aesthetic and a social commitment that structures the astonishing diversity of his subsequent work. Embodying his conviction that the photographer must combine technical intelligence, especially in the use of light, with a sensitive response to people, both works are photographic portfolios representing a cross-section of American lives—rural and urban, wealthy and leisured, poor and laboring.

Frequently identified as a Renaissance man, given the range of his accomplishments and the variety of media he has used, Parks was also the first African American to work for Life, Vogue, the Office of War Information, and the Farm Security Administration and one of the first African Americans to write, direct, produce, and score a film. While the commercial success of his work suggests he has fulfilled the American dream, a recognition of the demoralizing force of racism and poverty and the dignifying force of the struggle against these conditions underlies his entire creative output.

Parks grew up on a Kansas farm, where this defining dialectic was formed. As his autobiographical first novel, The Learning Tree (1963), and his subsequent autobiographies demonstrate, here he learned to value his parents' hard work, compassion, integrity, and capacity for hope as well as to fear the brutality and perversity of personal and institutionalized racism. While the young hero of The Learning Tree is tormented by a series of deaths, from natural causes and from racist violence, each of Parks's three autobiographies-A Choice of Weapons (1966), To Smile in Autumn, A Memoir (1979), Voices in the Mirror, An Autobiography (1990)—reviews these boyhood incidents, much as Frederick Douglass returned to his experiences during slavery in his three autobiographies. Parks's autobiographical works record his struggles first to survive and then to succeed in the white world; if he is able to record his relationships with well-known figures of this century, his family relationships always remain paramount.

Set in New York City against a backdrop of labor unrest and an emerging socialism, World War I, and the Depression, his nonautobiographical novel, Shannon (1981), is Dickensian in scope. Revealing America to be a racist and classist society, he describes the interdependent lives of Americans from differing racial and class backgrounds. Although European immigrants in Shannon rise to attain enormous wealth, their wealth proves either corrupting or immaterial to their happiness, and although college-educated African American war heroes appear doomed by financial failure and injustice, they die with dignity.

Through the interrelation of words and photographs in several other works, Parks continues to reflect on dialectic differences in human life and to contemplate their resolution. Thus powerful black-and-white portraits illuminate essays on African Americans prominent in the 1960s civil rights movement and on a destitute Harlem family in Born Black (1971), as well as the story of Parks's personal involvement with a boy in a Brazilian slum in Flavio (1978). Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera (1968), In Love (1971), Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things (1971), and Moments without Proper Names (1975), however, experimentally juxtapose lyrical poems with impressionistic color photographs. Focusing on nature, romantic love, loneliness, beauty, childhood, aging, and death, both the photographic and poetic images suggest a view of life transcending economic and racial oppression. Given their various settings—Europe, Asia, North and South America—as well as their putative apolitical content, these images show Parks seeking a universal language. Yet, the explicit subject of the first section of Moments without Proper Names is the suffering of African Americans. His frequently reprinted poem “Kansas Land” concludes its catalog of pastoral images with an evocation of the violence and fear blacks have endured.

In his films—The Learning Tree (1968), Shaft (1971), Shaft's Big Score (1972), The Super Cops (1974), and Leadbelly (1976)—and in his ballet, Martin (1990), Parks integrates his multiple talents, writing the screenplay and/or the score for several of them. These works explore the African American male experience in addition to celebrating the African American ability to prevail—through violence and peaceful resistance, music and love. In the mid-1990s Parks was at work on a biography of the early-nineteenth-century British painter J. M. W. Turner, with whom shares an interest in using light to reveal a complex world—one that includes slavery as well as multiple sources of beauty—more clearly. In 1997, to accompany a major traveling retrospective collection, Parks published Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective, a memoir illustrated by hundreds of his photographs.

Bibliography

• Martin H. Bush, The Photographs of Gordon Parks, 1983.
• Jane Ball, “Gordon Parks,” in DLB, vol. 33, Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, eds. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 1984, pp. 203–208.
• Deedee Moore, “Shooting Straight. The Many Worlds of Gordon Parks,” Smithsonian 20.1 (Apr. 1989): 66–72, 74, 76–77.
• “Gordon Parks,” in Black Literature Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Most Significant Works of Black Authors over the Past Two Hundred Years, vol. 3, ed. James P. Draper, 1992, pp. 1551–1557.
• Elizabeth Schultz, “Dreams Deferred: The Personal Narratives of Four Black Kansans,” American Studies 34.2 (Fall 1993): 25–52

Elizabeth Schul

Gordon Parks

For more information on Gordon Parks, visit Britannica.com.

(b Fort Scott, KS, 30 Nov 1912). American photographer, writer and composer. He worked in a number of professions before making a career as a photographer. Self-taught, in 1937 he became a freelance fashion photographer. He worked as one of the Farm Security Administration's photographic team (1942-3) and held a similar post with the Office of War Information (1943-5). He produced such pictures as Capitol Office Worker, Washington (1942), which features a black cleaner in front of the American flag, staring into the camera with mop and broom upturned, as if in salute. He worked for Life magazine from 1948 to 1961, producing photo-reportages on subjects including Harlem street gangs and the Civil Rights movement, with which as a black American he could identify. Thereafter he returned to freelance photography. He continued to take photographs in his later career, but he also wrote film scripts and novels, such as The Learning Tree and Born Black, both illustrated with his own photographs. He is noted for his attempts to combine photographic images with the written word. Among his works combining photographs with poetry are The Poet and His Camera (1968), Whispers of Intimate Things (1971) and Moments without Proper Names (1975).

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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Multi-faceted photojournalist, Gordon Parks (born 1912), documented many of the greatest images of the 20th century. He expanded his artistic pursuits from visual images to literature with his first novel, "The Learning Tree", which he then adapted into an award-winning motion picture. Over the years, his works have included musical composition, orchestration, and poetry. The limit of Parks' talent remains to be discovered as he evolves with characteristic grace into the era of digital photography.

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas on November 30, 1912. He was the youngest of 15 siblings, the children of Andrew and Sarah (Ross) Jackson Parks. The rumor survives, more than eight decades later, that Parks was born dead. In what must have seemed a miracle, the attending physician was able to revive the infant. The physician, Dr. Gordon, acquired a namesake in the process.

The Parks family members were victims of extreme poverty. Andrew Parks was a dirt farmer whose wife passed away when Gordon was only 15. Following the death of Sarah Parks, members of the Parks family dispersed, and Gordon went to St. Paul, Minnesota to stay with an older sister. In St. Paul he attended Central High and Mechanical Arts High School, but the hardships of adult life set in before he received a diploma. Parks had failed to establish a congenial relationship with his brother-in-law. Thus, life became difficult. The relationship grew increasingly strained until Parks abruptly left his sister's household. Still in high school and jobless, he carried few belongings with him into the frigid Minnesota winter. He survived by taking odd jobs and tried to finish his education, but soon dropped out and drifted in search of work.

Young Artist on His Own

Even as a very young child, Parks sensed his own gift of music. As a youngster, he played an old Kimball piano whenever he could find the time. He was, in fact, able to pick and play most instruments that crossed his path. That innate sense of music enabled Parks to secure work as a piano player, albeit in the setting of a brothel. In time Parks joined the Larry Funk Orchestra and went on tour until the band dissolved in New York, at which point he found himself in Harlem and jobless once again. Parks joined the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 and used that employment to return to Minnesota, where he married Sally Alvis. In 1935 Parks went to work for the railroad.

Parks was a porter on the Northern Pacific Railroad in the late 1930s when he purchased a 35mm camera, a Voightlander Brilliant, from a pawn shop in Seattle. He carried the $10 camera to Puget Sound and shot some pictures of seagulls. Those first pictures were impressive, and they were on display at the developer's shop within weeks. Soon Parks secured a professional "shoot" for a woman's apparel store in St. Paul. Eventually his work was seen by Marva Louis, wife of prize-fighter Joe Louis. In 1941, she convinced Parks to move to Chicago, where she used her influence to procure photography assignments for him. In his spare time, Parks photographed the urban ghettos, and again his work was impressive. Within the year, Parks received a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation to study photography. He used the opportunity to apprentice with Roy Stryker at the Farm Services Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C., beginning in January 1942. Parks documented images of the Great Depression. His first FSA picture, taken in 1942, was called "Washington, D.C. Government Charwoman." The classic photograph depicted a government employee, Ella Watson, who worked at one of the federal buildings in Washington, standing with a mop and broom against a backdrop of the American Flag. Parks found Watson to be an expressive subject, and he shot 85 pictures of her. The original photo of Watson, which is alternately titled "American Gothic, Washington, D.C." was one of over 200 works that Parks donated to Washington's Corcoran Art Gallery in 1998.

By 1943, Parks was a valued employee of Roy Stryker. When Stryker transferred to the Office of War Information, Parks went along. His assignment with the War Office was to document through photography the activities of the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee Airmen. He remained on that assignment until 1945 when he changed employers, again to work with Stryker. The pair went to work at Standard Oil in New Jersey where Parks photographed small towns and other urban views.

Parks was still employed by the federal government in 1944 when he accepted a freelance assignment from Vogue magazine to shoot some fashion sets. The Vogue assignments continued for several years. In 1947, Parks found the time to write a how-to book called Flash Photography. He followed with a second book called Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture in 1948. Also in 1948, Parks embarked on what evolved into a 20-year career as a member of the photography staff of Life magazine. That publication availed itself of his expressive artistry as well as his cultural background. As an African American, Parks received assignments few others would accept, including a moving and eloquent photographic documentary about the urban gangs in Harlem. Among the most expressive of the photographs in that work was a 1948 shot called "Red Jackson and Herbie Levy Study Wounds on Face of Slain Gang Member Maurice Gaines."

Brings Color to Life

During his career with Life, Parks photographed some of the most beautiful scenery and people in the world. In 1950, he spent two years in Paris, as the European correspondent for Life. He worked in the exclusive areas that bordered the Mediterranean Sea-France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Parks was privileged to photograph world aristocracy and celebrities, including Duke Ellington, Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rosselini, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Louis Armstrong. As Life opened new doors, Parks expanded his technical horizons. The growing popularity of film and television during the 1950s beckoned Parks to enlarge his creative arena. In 1958, he began his initial work with color photography, and the following year he added poetry to his repertoire. Life published a series of photographs by Parks, enhanced with verses of his own poems.

Parks went on to produce memorable photojournalism during the 1960s. In a 1961 essay on poverty in Brazil, his article centered on the family of Flavio Da Silva. Flavio, a twelve-year-old Brazilian boy at the time of the feature, was gravely ill, which put the welfare of his entire family into jeopardy. The Flavio Da Silva Story was hailed as a benchmark of journalism, partly because of the unanticipated outpouring of assistance provided to the Da Silva family in response to Parks' story.

Parks' work continued to profoundly influence the lives of his photographic subjects as well as his own family. In 1965, Parks documented the rift that occurred between civil rights leader Malcolm X and his church, the Nation of Islam. His work incensed the Nation of Islam, and Life was forced to provide security protection for Parks. His family left the country for a time, until the animosity subsided. In an earlier piece, in 1956, Parks described the plight of "Willy Causey and Family, Shady Grove, Alabama." The Causeys, too, were forced to flee their home under threats of retribution for Parks' honest yet disturbing journalism. The Causey essay, shot near Mobile, Alabama, was a documentary on the plight of segregated African Americans. In 1967, Parks documented a poverty-stricken family, the Fontenelles, from the tenements of Harlem. With intervention by Parks, the Fontenelles were assisted with $35,000 from Life. The money enabled the family to move to Long Island, although a series of tragedies continued to plague them.

Between 1968 and 1976, Parks worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter and film director. Beginning in 1968 and into 1969, he wrote the screenplay, produced the film, directed the filming, and composed the score for Learning Tree. The movie, which is autobiographical in nature, was filmed in Parks' hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. Following the critical success of his first film, Parks made two films about the character Shaft, in the 1970s. In 1976 he filmed a movie, Leadbelly, about the life of the folk singer and guitarist, Huddie Ledbetter.

Lengthy List of Credits

The resume of Gordon Parks reads impressively, with 14 books, eight films, 12 musical compositions, a ballet, exhibitions, photographs, and paintings to his credit. He donated a vast archive of his creative work to the U.S. Library of Congress in 1995, because he "wanted it all stored under one roof and a roof that I [Parks] could respect," he was quoted in Jet.James Billington, the librarian of Congress, graciously accepted Parks' offer.

September 17, 1997 marked the first ceremony of the Gordon Parks Independent Film Awards. Chris Williams won the directing award for Asbury Park and Sheldon Sampson won the screenwriting award for Two Guns. In 1988, Parks made a documentary for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) entitled "Gordon Parks: Moments without Proper Names." In August of that same year, he received the National Medal of the Arts from President Ronald Reagan. At that ceremony the Washington Press Corps honored Parks with a standing ovation.

In 1989, at the age of 76, Parks penned a ballet entitled, "Martin," about Martin Luther King, Jr. The following year, Parks was inducted into the Journalism Hall of Fame by the National Association of Black Journalists. He also embarked on the exploration of a new artistic medium-digital ink-jet printing. Parks used the art form to create abstractions, many of which are based on photographs of landscapes; but other objects, even paintings, are used as well. With this new art form, Parks placed great emphasis on light and dark.

In addition to The Learning Tree, Parks penned three autobiographies: A Choice of Weapons, (1966); To Smile in Autumn, (1979); and Voices in the Mirror, (1990). His numerous poetry anthologies include Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera, Arias of Silence, and Glimpses Toward Infinity.

Among the many exhibitions of Parks' works were "Moments Without Proper Names," in 1996 at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia; and the retrospective "Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks," which opened in September 1997 at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. "Half Past Autumn" went on to St. Paul, New York City, Detroit, Memphis, West Palm Beach, Atlanta, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and Chicago.

Parks has been the recipient of honorary degrees from a score of universities and art institutions. He was further honored by the Stockton School of East Orange, New Jersey-a communications media magnet, which was renamed the Gordon Parks Academy.

First Black

The prairie country where Parks spent his childhood was replete with segregated public schools, racially motivated killings, and even segregated cemeteries. Parks himself, on one occasion, was left to drown in a river because of his race, but survived the attack. He learned from his parents to avoid the "decay" of racism. He was quoted in Life, "The anger and bitterness are there, but you use those emotions to help you do what you want to do." In adulthood, Parks was the first African American photographer at Life and earlier the first African American at FSA. He witnessed, during his early career in Washington, the segregation of lunch counters, theaters, and other public buildings. Parks' production of The Learning Treewas the first "studio-financed" Hollywood motion picture directed by an African American.

Parks presented his reflections on racism through selected works. Born Black, a collection of his photographic essays for Life on the topic of black activism, was published in 1971. Parks directed the movie, Odyssey of Solomon Northrup in 1988. It tells the story, based in fact, about a free black man from the North who was taken into slavery by Southerners in the 1800s.

Close-Up

In contrast to his youth, Parks makes his home in a serene studio in Manhattan, overlooking the East River. He was quoted in Life concerning his latest creative outlet of painting, "I paint how I feel when I wake up. I may feel gentle, or very abrupt, like a dragon out of the sky."

Through nearly 50 years of married life, Parks maintained friendships with a trio of ex-wives. He and Sally Alvis Parks divorced in 1961 after 28 years of marriage. The following year, he married Elizabeth Campbell Rollins. They divorced in 1973. Later that year, on August 26, Parks married Genevieve Young. That final marriage lasted six years; the couple divorced in 1979.

Parks has three children from his first marriage: David, Leslie, and Toni Parks Parsons. An older son, Gordon Jr., was killed in a plane crash in 1979. Parks has two grandsons: Alain and Gordon III, and was honored to be named the godfather of Malcolm X's daughter, Qubilah Shabazz.

Further Reading

American Visions, August/September 1997, p. 11.

Jet, April 30, 1990, p. 12; July 31, 1995, p. 21; June 17, 1996, p. 23; December 16, 1996, p. 34; October 6, 1997, p. 35; January 19, 1998, p. 21; October 19, 1998, p. 33; December 7, 1998, p. 22.

Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, February 2, 1994.

Life, October, 1994, p. 26; September 1997, p. 94.

New York Amsterdam News, September 11, 1997, p. 29; September 25, 1997, p. 30.

Modern Maturity, June/July 1989, p. 56.

PSA Journal, November 1992, p. 26(8).

Smithsonian, April 1989, p. 66.

USA Today, September 1998, p. 46.

World & I, September 1993, p. 184(10).

photographer; movie director; writer; composer

Personal Information

Born Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, KS; son of Andrew Jackson and Sarah (Ross) Parks; married Sally Alvis in Washington, D.C., 1933 (divorced, 1961); married Elizabeth Campbell, 1962 (divorced, 1973); married Genevieve Young (an editor), 1973 (divorced, 1979); children (first marriage) Gordon, Jr. (died, 1979), Toni Parks Parson, David; (second marriage) Leslie.

Career

Free-lance fashion photographer in St. Paul, MN, 1937-42; Farm Security Administration, photographer, 1942-43; Office of War Information, photojournalist war correspondent 1943; Standard Oil of New Jersey, photographer, 1944-48; Life magazine, photojournalist and photoessayist, 1948-68; independent photographer and filmmaker, 1954-; numerous documentary and feature films; Essence, founder, 1970, editorial director 1970-73; author of novels, poetry and photography; creator, composer, and director.

Life's Work

In 2002, at the age of 90, Gordon Parks received the Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum. These honors were only the two latest tributes bestowed on a man whose achievements in photography, literature, film, and ballet have earned him more than twenty doctorates and numerous awards. When asked why he undertook so many professions, Parks told Black Enterprise "At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it. I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand."

Driven by this determination to "drive failure from my dreams and to push on," Parks became the first black photographer to work at magazines like Life and Vogue, and the first black to work for the Office of War Information and the Farm Security Administration. Parks achieved these milestones in the 1940s. Later, in the 1960s, he helped break racial barriers in Hollywood as the first black director for a major studio. He co-produced, directed, wrote the screenplay, and composed the musical score for the film based on his 1963 novel, The Learning Tree. The film was later placed on the National Film Register by the Library of Congress.

The youngest of fifteen children, Gordon Parks was born into the devout Methodist family of Sarah Ross Parks and Andrew Jackson Parks in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas. It was a town "electrified with racial tension," Parks remembered. The family was dirt-poor, but the children were taught to value honor, education, and equality, as well as the importance of telling the truth. The security that Parks derived from the quiet strength of his father and his mother's love was shattered when she died during his fifteenth year. As he recalled in Voices in the Mirror, he spent the night alone with her coffin, an experience he found both "terror-filled and strangely reassuring."

After his mother's death, Parks was sent to live with a sister and her husband in St. Paul, Minnesota. His high school education was cut short when, after an argument, his sister's husband threw him out of the house just before Christmas one year. Suddenly and unexpectedly on his own, Parks was forced to take a variety of temporary jobs that included playing piano in a brothel and mopping floors. As a busboy at the Hotel Lowry in St. Paul, he played his own songs on the piano there and joined a band that was on tour after the leader heard him play.

Unfortunately, the band broke up when they returned to New York. Stuck in Harlem, living in a rat-infested tenement and unable to find work, Parks joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1933. He married Sally Alvis in 1933 and returned to St. Paul in 1934, taking a job there as a dining car waiter and porter on the North Coast Limited. The couple had three children, Gordon, Jr., Toni, and David.

His Early Interest in Photography

Parks became interested in photography while working on the railroad. He took his first pictures in Seattle, Washington, in 1937, at the end of his "run" from St. Paul. As Parks recalled for The Black Photographers Annual, "I bought my first camera in a pawn shop there. It was a Voigtlander Brilliant and cost $12.50. With such a brand name, I could not resist." He took his first pictures on Seattle's waterfront, even falling off the pier as he photographed sea gulls in flight. Upon his return to the Midwest, he dropped his film off at Eastman Kodak in Minneapolis. "The man at Kodak told me the shots were very good and if I kept it up, they would give me an exhibition. Later, Kodak gave me my first exhibition," Parks recalled.

Against all odds, Parks made a name for himself in St. Paul as a fashion photographer. When Marva Louis, the wife of heavy-weight champion, Joe Louis, saw his photographs on display in a fashionable store, she encouraged him to move to Chicago where she could steer more fashion work his way. Using the darkroom of Chicago's South Side Arts Center, a black community arts center, he supported his family through fashion photography while documenting life in the city's slums. His documentary photographs won him a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941, paying him $200 a month and offering him his choice of employer. In January 1942, he went to work in Washington, D.C., for Roy Emerson Stryker in the photography section of the Farm Security Administration, where he joined some of the finest documentary photographers in the country.

Parks took one of his most significant photographs on his first day in the nation's capital. He called it "American Gothic, Washington, D.C.," a portrait of Mrs. Ella Watson, a black woman who had mopped floors for the government all her life, posed with a mop and broom in front of an American flag. After a day of facing racial prejudice in restaurants and stores, Parks was angry when he took the photo. As the first black in the FSA, Parks did all he could to break down racial barriers, and he had the full support of his boss, Roy Stryker. While at the FSA, Parks took documentary photographs of everyday life. He spoke of his camera as if it were a weapon, "I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil--along with the evil of racism--with a camera."

After the FSA disbanded in 1943, Parks worked as a correspondent for the Office of War Information, where he taught himself about "writing to the point." One of his assignments was photographing the training of the first unit of black fighter pilots, the 332nd Fighter Group. Prohibited from accompanying them to Europe and documenting their participation in the war effort, Parks left in disgust and moved back to Harlem. In New York, he attempted to land a position with a major fashion magazine. The Hearst Organization, publisher of Harper's Bazaar, would not hire a black man. Impressed by Parks's experience, famed photographer Edward Steichen sent him to Alexander Liberman, director of Vogue magazine. Liberman put Parks in touch with the senior editor of Glamour magazine, and by the end of 1944 Parks's photographs appeared in both magazines. Parks's former boss, Roy Stryker, offered him a position with Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1944. Parks would stay there until he joined Life magazine as a photojournalist in 1948, shooting pictures of the company's executives and doing a notable documentary series for Standard Oil on life in America.

Began Career at Life Magazine

Parks's first assignment for Life was one of his most significant, a profile of Harlem gang leader Red Jackson. It was an idea Parks himself suggested, and he stayed with the gangs for three months. His most famous photograph of Red Jackson is one in which the gang leader has a .45 pistol in his hand, waiting for a showdown with a rival gang. Parks would work at Life for nearly a quarter of a century, until 1972, completing more than 300 assignments. When asked by The Black Photographers Annual to name his most important stories for Life, Parks listed the Harlem gang story, his first Paris fashion shoot in 1949, the Ingrid Bergman-Roberto Rosellini love affair on Stromboli, a cross-country U.S. crime series, an American poetry series that interpreted in photographs the works of leading U.S. poets, the Black Muslims and Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and Martin Luther King's death. By the early 1960s, Parks was writing his own essays to accompany his photographs in Life.

Parks provided the readers of Life magazine with a unique view of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. As Phil Kunhardt, Jr., assistant managing editor of Life, recalled for Deedee Moore, "At first he made his name with fashion, but when he covered racial strife for us, there was no question that he was a black photographer with enormous connections and access to the black community and its leaders." It was Malcolm X's trust of Parks that allowed him to do a feature on the Black Muslim leader. Malcolm X wrote of Parks in his autobiography, "Success among whites never made Parks lose touch with black reality."

Real life and photography were often closely intertwined in Parks's work. In 1961 he was on assignment in Brazil to document poverty there. He met a young, asthmatic boy named Flavio Da Silva who was dying in the hills above Rio de Janeiro. Parks's now-famous photo-essay on Flavio resulted in donations of thousands of dollars, enabling Parks to bring the boy to a clinic in the United States for treatment. Flavio was cured and lives today outside of Rio; Parks and Flavio have remained friends.

Embarked On Cinematic Sojourn

Parks began his cinematic career by writing and directing a documentary about Flavio in 1962. In 1968 he became the first black to produce and direct a film for a major studio, Warner Bros. Seven Arts. The film, The Learning Tree, was based on Parks's 1963 autobiographical novel and featured lush romanticism. Surprisingly, Parks also directed some highly commercial dramas, including Shaft (1971), Shaft's Big Score (1972), and The Super Cops (1974). As described by Donald Bogle in Blacks in American Films and Television, "Almost all his films [except The Super Cops] reveal his determination to deal with assertive, sexual black heroes, who struggle to maintain their manhood amid mounting social/political tensions.... In some respects, his films ... can generally be read as heady manhood initiation rituals."

The commercial success of the Shaft films put MGM studios back on its feet financially after some difficult times, but Parks was not assured of a lasting place in Hollywood. Something of a maverick, Parks found himself in a dispute with Paramount Pictures over the distribution and promotion of his 1976 film, Leadbelly, which tells the story of the legendary folk and blues singer. Paramount's new management denied the film a New York opening, thus lessening its impact, and Parks felt the advertising campaign made the movie appear to be another "blaxploitation" film. Declining to do another Hollywood movie, Parks went on to film several documentaries for television and the Public Broadcasting System, including Solomon Northrup's Odyssey, The World of Piri Thomas, Diary of a Harlem Family, and Mean Streets.

The Learning Tree, Parks's autobiographical novel and subsequent film, was his first published work of fiction. The story is about a black family in a small Kansas town; it focuses on Newt Winger, the youngest son. As described in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "On one level, it is the story of a particular Negro family who manages to maintain its dignity and self-respect as citizens and decent human beings in a border Southern town. On another, it is a symbolic tale of the black man's struggle against social, economic, and natural forces, sometimes winning, sometimes losing.... Because the family is portrayed as a normal American family whose blackness is a natural circumstance and therefore not a source of continual pain and degradation, the book contributes greatly to a positive view of black people."

Parks followed The Learning Tree with A Choice of Weapons. Published in 1966, it was the first of three autobiographical works he would write. The book detailed in a fairly straightforward manner the time of his life that was fictionalized in The Learning Tree, covering Parks's life from the time of his mother's death to 1944. It was a time that Parks has described as "a sentence in hell."

Awarded Springarn Medal

Parks's second volume of memoirs was published in 1979. To Smile in Autumn begins in 1944, when his first fashion photographs were appearing in Vogue and Glamour, and ends in 1978, when Parks had done just about everything he had set out to do. His creative output during that period was phenomenal. In addition to his work in film and television, Parks published several volumes of his own poetry with accompanying photographs. In 1972 the NAACP awarded him the prestigious Spingarn Medal following the publication in 1971 of Born Black, a collection of articles on notable African-Americans. By 1975 Parks was married to his third wife, editor Genevieve Young, and had a major retrospective showing twenty-five years of his photographs in New York. He lived in New York in a large apartment overlooking the East River near the United Nations building.

As Voices in the Mirror attests, though, Parks was not about to retire. In 1988 he received the National Medal of Arts from President Reagan, and his autobiographical film, Moments without Proper Names, aired on PBS. He completed the musical score and libretto for Martin, a ballet about Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1989 and began filming it for PBS, where it was shown on King's birthday in 1990. Grace Blake, the producer of Martin, had worked with Parks on some of his Hollywood films. She told the Smithsonian, "Gordon's vision of this whole project is so important to all of us.... There are not that many good projects being done about black people.... [Martin] is totally conceived by a black man who is an artist--who wrote the libretto, the music, directed the film, worked on the choreography, narrated, did his own fund raising. Absolutely, we know we are working with a genius."

In 1995 Parks donated his archives of films, photographs, writings, and other memorabilia to the Library of Congress. Parks said the donation was made because, as he told Jet, "I wanted it all stored under one roof and a roof that I could respect." In 1998 he published Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective. The book accompanied a traveling exhibit of his work organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Parks donated 227 pieces of artwork from the show to the Corcoran Gallery later in 1998.

In 2002 the 90-year-old Parks was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in Oklahoma City and received the Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. Although he was no longer as active as he once was, his body of work is still being recognized as an amazing contribution to American culture.

Awards

Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, 1941; Notable Book Award, American Library Association for A Choice of Weapons, 1966; Emmy Award for documentary, Diary of a Harlem Family, 1968; Spingarn Award, 1972; Christopher Award for Flavio, 1978; National Medal of the Arts, 1988; Library of Congress National Film Registry Classics film honor for The Learning Tree, 1989; honorary Doctor of Letters, University of the District of Columbia, 1996; induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, 2002; Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 2002.

Works

Selected writings

• Flash Photography, New York, 1947.
• Camera Portraits: The Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture, Franklin Watts, 1948.
• The Learning Tree (novel), Harper & Row, 1963.
• A Choice of Weapons (autobiography), Harper & Row, 1966.
• A Poet and His Camera (poetry and photographs), Viking, 1968.
• Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things (poetry and photographs), Viking, 1971.
• Born Black (essays and photographs), Lippincott, 1971.
• In Love (poetry and photographs), Lippincott, 1971.
• Moments Without Proper Names (poetry and photographs), Viking, 1975.
• Flavio, Norton, 1978.
• To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir, Norton, 1979.
• Shannon (novel), Little, Brown, 1981.
• Voices in the Mirror (autobiography), Doubleday, 1990.
• Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective, Bulfinch: Little Brown, 1998.

Further Reading

Books

• The Black Photographers Annual, Volume 4, edited by Joe Crawford, Another View, 1980.
• Bogle, Donald, Blacks in American Films and Television: An Encyclopedia, Garland, 1988.
• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Volume 26, Gale Research.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 33, Gale Research.
• Gordon Parks, Chelsea House, 1990.

Periodicals

• Afterimage, March 2002.
• American Visions, December 1989.
• Black Enterprise, January 1992.
• Detroit Free Press, January 9, 1991.
• Jet, July 31, 1995; September 23, 1996; October 6, 1997; January 19, 1998; October 19, 1998; April 8, 2002.
• Library Journal, February 1, 1998.
• Modern Maturity, June-July 1989.
• New York Times Book Review, December 9, 1990.
• Smithsonian, April 1989.
• USA Today (Magazine), September 1998.

— David Bianco and Pat Donaldson

Parks, Gordon (1912-2006), American photographer, born in Kansas. At 15, when already active as a writer and musician, he became interested in photography, doing freelance fashion work in Minneapolis 1937-42. As a promising young African-American he won a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942 to study documentary photography in Washington, DC, under Roy Stryker at the ‘Historical Section’ of the Farm Security Administration, where he became a staff photographer. He stayed on when the agency became part of the Office of War Information in 1943-4, and worked for Stryker again in the Standard Oil of New Jersey documentary project (1945-8). From 1948 to 1961 he was a staffer at Life, and thereafter an independent photographer until he became editorial director of Essence magazine. From 1961 he worked increasingly in film as well as photography, directing The Learning Tree (1969), Shaft (1971), and Leadbelly (1976). He published Camera Portraits: The Techniques and Principles of Documentary Photography in 1948. He also produced remarkable portraits, most notably of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Duke Ellington.

— Constance B. Schulz

Bibliography

• Buchsteiner, T., and Steinorth, K. (eds.), Gordon Parks: 40 Jahre Photographie (1989).
• Parks, G., Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography (1990)

• Born: Nov 30, 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas
• Died: Mar 07, 2006 in Manhattan, New York, New York
• Occupation: Director, Actor, Writer
• Active: '60s-'80s, 2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Action
• Career Highlights: Shaft, Shaft's Big Score!, Leadbelly
• First Major Screen Credit: The Learning Tree (1969)

Biography

African-American filmmaker Gordon Parks had little chance of cracking the all-white Hollywood cinematographers' fraternity in the '50s, despite impeccable credentials as a photojournalist for Life magazine. Parks' entry into feature-length moviemaking came by way of the 1969 adaptation of his own autobiographical work The Learning Tree, which related the experience of growing up black in Kansas. Parks sold the story to Hollywood on the proviso that he be allowed to direct -- thus making him the first-ever "mainstream" black director. 1971's Shaft (starring Richard Roundtree), wherein Parks utilized the no-nonsense street savvy he'd gleaned in his teen years as a whorehouse piano player and dope runner, put the director on Hollywood's A-List. He helmed Shaft's Big Score in 1972 (and composed the music for it), but his subsequent films, Leadbelly and Supercops, while critically acclaimed, failed to match the box-office appeal of the street hero that Parks and Roundtree had created. He took his final bow as a director with 1985's Solomon Northrup's Odyssey, a slavery-era period piece produced for PBS' American Playhouse, but - despite his retirement from the cinema -- remained incredibly active in many other arenas, proving himself a bona fide renaissance man of innumerable talents. His additional accomplishments include authoring fiction (the 1978 Flavio and the 1981 Shannon), poetry (the 2000 collection A Star for Noon), a myriad of photographic compilations, memoirs, and even a ballet, Martin, on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Parks triumphed in every arena, consistently drawing critical adulation, and worked well into his nineties. He died at age 93, on Tuesday, March 7, 2006.

Parks fathered four children, one of whom -- Gordon Parks Jr. -- became a successful director in his own right (Superfly). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Half Past Autumn: The Life and Art of Gordon Parks Buy this Movie	Shaft Buy this Movie	Shaft's Big Score! Buy this Movie	Gordon Parks: "Visions" Buy this Movie
Solomon Northup's Odyssey Buy this Movie	Shaft Buy this Movie	The Learning Tree Buy this Movie

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