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Gordon Parks

American photographer, musician, writer and film director (1912–2006)

This article is about the photographer. For his son, the American film director, see Gordon Parks Jr. For the Scottish sports journalist and former footballer, see Gordon Parks (footballer).

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks (November 30, 1912 – March 7, 2006) was an American photographer, composer, author, poet, and filmmaker, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African Americans—and in glamour photography. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s (taken for a federal government project), for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.

Parks was one of the first black American filmmakers to direct films within the Hollywood system, developing films relating the experience of slaves and struggling black Americans, and helping create the "blax

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Biography

Gordon Parks moved from his native Fort Scott, Kansas, to Minneapolis in 1928 and became a photographer in 1937 after seeing examples of Farm Security Administration photographs reproduced in a magazine. He was a fashion photographer in Minneapolis and Chicago, before going to Washington, DC and finding work with Roy Stryker at the FSA; he subsequently photographed for the Office of War Information and at the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Parks worked as a fashion photographer at Vogue beginning in 1944, and when Life hired him as a staff photographer in 1948, he accepted assignments both in fashion and photojournalism. He remained at Life until 1970, producing many of his most important photo essays, such as those on Harlem gangs, segregation in the South, his own experiences with racism; on Flavio da Silva, a poor child living in Brazil; and on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Panthers. Parks's many books include Camera Portraits (1943), A Choice of Weapons (1966), Born Black (1971), Moments Without Proper Names (1975), and Half Past Autumn

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“I was born dead”, recounts Gordon Parks in “Half Past Autumn”, a 2000 documentary about his life and career from HBO. He wasn’t kidding. The doctor and his sisters had to race to revive him, doing the trick by ice shock! His beginning was almost and end, and this theme stayed with him throughout his career as he pushed through one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after another on his way to “legendary”.

In an era where the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” is as cliché as “my two cents” (which is more than I’m getting paid for this seminal masterpiece) Gordon Parks used his camera to pen entire novels, composing narratives that spanned the complexities of the human condition. Sounds heavy. It was. Key to gaining that weight was Parks’ knack for finding the dramatic unseen in the dusky corridors of photojournalism. He went places no one else at the time dared to.

His journey from a self-taught photographer to a visionary who illuminated the pages of Vogue and the gritty streets of Harlem alike, stands as a testament to his ability to capture