In 1999, Gordon Parks received his fifty-sixth honorary doctorate degree. In accepting this award from Princeton University, the nonagenarian Parks expressed his wish that the white high-school English teacher in Kansas who had told him and his black classmates that their families should not waste their money on sending them to college might have been present for this occasion. Although he did not go on to finish high school, Parks, who died in New York in March, 2006, during his lifetime received accolades, honors, and distinctions from a wide range of national organizations, including the National Medal of Art, presented by President Ronald Reagan in 1988, for his achievements during a long, creative, and socially conscious life. His work as a photojournalist, fashion photographer, art photographer, novelist, poet, memoirist, scriptwriter, filmmaker, and music composer, in which he combined a commitment to social justice with an aesthetic for beauty and tragedy, took him far beyond his Kansas origins and the erroneous and potentially damaging judgment of his high school English teacher. In the course of his long life, during which he moved from Kansas to Minnesota, Chicago, Washington, and New York, to Paris, Barcelona, and Rio, to Africa and Asia, he learned from his own experiences, from his associations with ordinary and extraordinary individuals, and from his continuous desire to create and to experiment with diverse genres and diverse media. While his work was significantly influenced by the social and cultural circumstances wherever he lived, the time he spent in Chicago, where he became familiar with the work of Black Chicago Renaissance writer Richard Wright and his colleagues, provided a formative dimension to his vision as it played out in the variety of genres in which he worked during his long life.
Just as Frederick Douglass rewrote the narrative of his years in slavery and of his escape to freedom in each of his three autobiographies, Parks relives his Kansas experiences in each of his six autobiographical works as well as in numerous interviews. His autobiographies invariably begin with tribute to his parents—Andrew Jackson and Sarah. Born on November 30, 1912, the last of fifteen children, he was raised on the family’s farm outside of Fort Scott. He credits his parents’ lessons in perseverance and dignity and love to his survival in a racist society and to his decision to choose art—words and pictures, the pen and the camera—as his “weapons” rather than violence and hatred.1 His experiences with racism, both individual and institutional, began as a boy in Kansas where he was subjected to segregated schools and witnessed the persecution of black acquaintances. Although he attained worldwide renown and respect, Parks never forgot that his beloved parents as well as other members of his family lay in a segregated cemetery in Fort Scott, a fact he recalled frequently in his interviews and autobiographies.
Parks’s boyhood was characterized not only by the intimacy and support of his family, but also by his appreciation for the beauty of the Kansas landscape. In 2004, on the occasion of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius’s declaring June 12 to be “Gordon Parks Day,” Parks commented that “Kansas was [a] marvelous place for me and a terrible place.”2 His poem, “Kansas Land,” which appears in several of his books, enumerates the delight he took in the state’s natural beauty: “Cloud tufts billowing across the round blue sky. / Butterflies to chase through grass high as the chin. / Junebugs, swallowtails, red robin and bobolink, / Nights filled of soft laughter, fireflies and restless stars.” The poem’s conclusion, however, indicates that these pleasures were tempered by “the fear, hatred and violence / We blacks had suffered upon this beautiful land.”3 This bifurcated vision—of perceiving tragedy simultaneously with beauty—which he first felt during his Kansas boyhood becomes a primary attribute of his aesthetic.
Immediately following his mother’s death, Gordon, at age fifteen, was sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with a sister—a traumatic event that quickly introduced him into a changing and complex urban society, first in St. Paul and then in Chicago. After an altercation with his brother-in-law, he found himself on the street, penniless and homeless, in a frigid climate. “It was,” he explains in Half Past Autumn, “a frightening leap to a big metropolis that would wash over me like a cold sea.”4 From 1927 to 1934, Parks shifted among a variety of jobs that were available for young black men during the Depression—playing piano in a brothel, washing dishes, busing dishes, writing songs, traveling with a band, working for the Civilian Conservation Corps, waiting on tables for the transcontinental North Coast Limited.
Although these years stimulated his musical sensibility, and his song “No Love” prompted band leader Larry Funk to invite him to join his group, it was Parks’s discovery of the Farm Security Administration photographs in a magazine left behind on the North Coast Limited that changed the direction of his life. The FSA photographs moved him to acquire his first camera, a $7.50 Voight-lander Brilliant in 1938 in a Seattle pawn shop. The FSA photographs of migrants and desperate farmers by such distinguished photographers as Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn moved Parks not only because of their subjects—America’s dispossessed, men and women, old and young, black and white, in rural and urban settings—but also because of their powerful, stark black-and-white imagery. In the seven decades since Parks was first moved by a photograph and first held a camera, his own photographic record of the world’s bigotry and poverty on the one hand, and of its capacity for compassion and beauty on the other, has been the primary basis for his renown.
The impact of the FSA pictures was reinforced by John Steinbeck’s novels, by the images in Erskine Caldwell’s and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), and by the photographs and perspective of Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941). In a 1963 issue of Popular Photography, Parks listed 12 Million Black Voices as one of the two books he valued most; later, he named it the “bible” for this formative stage in his writing and photography careers.5 Later Parks remembered Wright—for whom he provided a dust jacket photo for Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy (1945)—as “neat, soft-spoken, well-groomed, and scholarly looking, seemingly free of the scars of his terrible Southern boyhood.” Yet a sort of “terror lurked in his soft eyes.”6 Clearly, the aesthetic of Chicago Renaissance figures, such as Wright and Edwin Rosskam, whom Parks “shadowed” during his years in Chicago, impacted Parks’s own artistic vision, particularly in the “simplicity, directness, and force” that Horace Cayton, in a November, 15, 1941, review in the Pittsburgh Courier, identified as a characteristic of Wright’s and Rosskam’s work.7
In the two years following the acquisition of his first camera, Parks began to explore and reveal the two elements of his complex vision—his perception of the shifting intersections of beauty and tragedy in human life. This dual perspective became apparent as he devoted himself to photographing both women’s fashion and the lives of black America, two subjects which continued to occupy him in his long career as a photographer. In Minneapolis, with a young family (he had married Sally Alvis in 1933) and with no steady income, he decided to try his hand at fashion photography, a field in which he later became an acknowledged master. Some of his photographs, appearing in a fashionable Minneapolis women’s clothing store, caught the eye of Marva Louis, wife of heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis, who encouraged him to move to Chicago in 1940, where through her connections, she believed he could make a profitable living as a fashion photographer and by doing photo shoots of the city’s society matrons.
As all six of his autobiographies indicate, Chicago proved to be pivotal in Parks’s growth, as the site where he became conscious of the significance of art in human life and of himself as an artist depicting human life. During his brief layovers in Chicago when he was working on the North Coast Limited he saw the despair in the lives of men living in flophouses as well as the luxurious ease of the wealthy. In Chicago, he observed the power of documentary newsreels and repeatedly visited the Chicago Art Institute, where he learned to appreciate the compositions in the paintings of Reubens, Renoir, and Matisse. These two different visual media—contemporary newsreel footage and European paintings—provided important models for him; they showed him equally “the power of a good picture,” as he explained in his first autobiography, A Choice of Weapons.8
Marva Louis also introduced him to Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center, where, as he describes in A Choice of Weapons, for the first time he met diverse artists who discussed with him art’s power to effect change and who encouraged him to exhibit his photographs. Thus while making a living in Chicago by focusing on fashion, Parks also committed himself to showing its antithesis. He began to use his camera to focus on “the dismal acres of the south side, photographing depressed black people and the shacks and brick tenements that entombed them,” determined “to strike at the evil of poverty” and, thereby, to illuminate the national tragedy of racism and poverty.9 Influenced by the FSA pictures, he developed a documentary style of photography in Chicago, which allowed him to show the appalling effects of racism and poverty in explicit and dramatic images. In his early documentary photographs of Chicago’s South Side, Parks began to perceive that tragedy could be revealed in combination with the astonishing and beautiful inner lives of his subjects. Later, in direct and forceful narratives in all six of his autobiographies, Parks dramatizes his personal experiences in Chicago, the urban setting where he was introduced to an intensification of the violence and despair, engendered by the racism and poverty he had first witnessed in rural Kansas.
Parks’s depictions of Chicago’s South Side were the immediate catalyst for his future success as a photographer. In 1941, they earned him the coveted Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, which in turn led to the director of the FSA, Roy Emerson Stryker’s bringing him to Washington, D.C., to finish out the fellowship under the umbrella of the FSA itself. Stryker influenced Parks critically, encouraging him not only to look for the story behind his subjects but also to “think in terms of words and images. They can be mighty powerful when they are fitted together properly.”10 Given the visual impact of Parks’s descriptive and dramatic language in his six autobiographies, his cinematic career, and the shift in his later years toward the creation of books in which words and images intersect, Stryker’s advice was prophetic in Parks’s work as an artist and helped to set him on the path of experimenting with the interrelationship of media to convey his messages.
In Washington, Parks was impressed by the capital’s monuments, but he rapidly realized that they obscured the racism and poverty he had confronted throughout his life. Advised by Stryker to meet blacks who had intimately experienced these conditions, he became acquainted with Ella Watson, a cleaning woman in the FSA building, and in 1942 he photographed her standing against an immense American flag, flanked by a broom and a mop. His image of this slight, reflective woman in her simple dress, which complements Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic, where a white American couple stand with their farm implements, has become iconic, representing the millions of black Americans who perform the nation’s tasks with much dignity and little recognition. Parks’s acquaintance with Watson led to his creating the first of his black-and-white photographic portfolios focused on a particular family or historical event. His photographs of Watson with her grandchildren and of these children with a large white doll have also become well-known, not only for their compositions, but also for their visual insight into the impact of white standards of beauty on African American children and into the closeness of African American families.
In 1944, Parks returned to fashion photography, recognizing that this work would provide him with a steady income. He resigned from federal employment and moved to New York City, where he continued to live until his death in 2006, with intermittent periods abroad. Although Harper’s Bazaar refused to hire him because of his race, he secured a recommendation from the renowned photographer, Edward Steichen, which landed him jobs, first doing casual-wear assignments for Glamour and then doing evening gowns for Vogue, where he would work for the following five years. Parks’s photographs of haute couture focus on prominent symbols of wealth and power—sumptuous women and sumptuous clothes. Although he continued to use black-and-white for his fashion work during the 1940s and early 1950s, he increasingly experimented with color. His lavish color pictures of models posed to display their luxurious gowns in contrived and exotic settings contrast emphatically with his black-and-white pictures of lower- and middle-class people. Staged to appeal to a wealthy clientele, these pictures use color to highlight the desirability of both the models and their garments. The success of his work for Vogue led to his first European trip, sponsored by Life, to photograph the French collections being shown in Paris in 1950. Admittedly Parks was captivated by beautiful women and their clothes and by Paris, which he identified in Half Past Autumn as being “a long way from the cornfields of Kansas,”11 and he continued to photograph the world of haute couture throughout Europe and the United States for many decades. Although later Parks acknowledged that fashion photography was “rewarding,” he also realized that it was “rarefied.”12 Although the women in most fashion photography are arranged to appear as exquisite artifacts, Parks’s use of lighting as well as gesture often gives a vibrancy to these mannequins and a complexity to their inner lives. His 1960 black-and-white portrait of the heiress, Gloria Vanderbilt, in which he captures her intense brooding as she stands posed in an elaborate dress with a constricting waist, epitomizes his ability to reveal the inner lives of these women.
In the late 1940s, just as Parks was becoming known for his magazine work, he published two instructional books on photography—Flash Photography (1947) and Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948). During this decade, Stryker also invited Parks to join a seventeen-man photography team at New Jersey’s Standard Oil Company where he was given the double assignment of photographing corporate executives and documenting life at midcentury throughout the United States. To fulfill the latter part of this project, Parks traveled throughout New England, focusing on ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities. In the majority of these works, Parks, like the well-known French photographer of the 1940s and 1950s, Henri Cartier-Bresson, concentrates on “a decisive moment,” a moment that is revealed in the intensity in his subject’s expression. He also created three significant photographic portfolios during this period which illuminated different aspects of African American lives: the black fighter pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group; the August 1943 Harlem riot; and a Harlem gang. A visit to Richard Wright landed Parks in the middle of a Harlem riot. His pictures, taken on the spot, document not only the poverty that caused the riot but also a range of emotions—pain, terror, desperation, confusion, exhaustion, patience—in the individual faces of those watching and participating in the riot.
The impact of these images led directly to his appointment at Life in 1948, an appointment in which he would be doing both feature and fashion photography, an appointment that would last until 1972. To give focus to his first assignment—on Harlem gangs, Parks again chose a particular individual, Red Jackson, a sixteen-year-old gang leader. “Red’s perilous existence,” he wrote, “was a far cry from the perfumed houses of high fashion. Such a double-faced reality posed the kind of readjustment that was hard to come by.”13 His powerful photographic essay on Red and members of his gang—staring through a broken window, fighting, looking into the coffin of a slain friend—were the first of over 300 assignments that Parks would produce for Life. Of his photographic career in general, Parks writes in Half Past Autumn, “Tyrants, dictators, dethroned kings, beggars, queens, harlots, priests, the uplifting and the despoilers—all stared into my camera with eyes that were unveiled. The camera revealed them as they were—human beings imprisoned inside themselves.”14
During his early years with Life, Parks was frequently sent abroad to photograph the world’s celebrities as well as its rich and poor. In 1951 he was in Europe for Otto of Hapsburg’s wedding, for Marshal Petain’s funeral, and for Dwight Eisenhower’s Paris visit. But in France and Portugal, he also captured a sleeping couple on a bench, a beggar playing the accordion, a political meeting of grim-faced men in a tavern, a shrewd bespectacled woman shopper, a child opening the doors onto a balcony. In Portugal, he captured a young girl holding a baby, smiling street boys, a destitute woman with her child, a severe matron in fur. Life sent Parks to Stomboli to cover the ostensibly scandalous romance between the Italian director, Roberto Rossellini, and the Swedish American actress, Ingrid Bergman. However, his photographs testify to his having discovered instead two human beings, as he felt, troubled by “heartache and uncertainty.”15
However, Parks’s commitment to using his camera to reveal the experiences of American blacks continued to be reflected in Life as well, with his autobiographies supplementing his photographs in order to expose American racism and poverty and to explain in succinct words his deepening moral concerns. On assignment in 1949, he returned to Fort Scott to trace the lives of the eleven black members of his junior high-school class and to note the town’s changes since his departure twenty-three years earlier. In 1956, he spent weeks in Alabama, preparing a photographic essay on “Segregation in the Deep South.” Again, Parks made a single family the centerpiece of his essay, and as a result of his particularizing the effects of racism and poverty through the moving pictures of Willie Causey, his wife, and children in their home, living with courage and dignity in the midst of continuing attempts at degradation, Life’s editors acknowledged the impact he made on their readership by continuing to give him socially charged assignments.
Parks returned to Chicago in 1957, in conjunction with a story for Life on “Crime in America.” In Voices in the Mirror, Parks designates Chicago as “a mecca of criminal transgression since Al Capone’s reign of gangland terror,” and in Half Past Autumn he calls the city “a mecca for drug addiction, murder, and corruption.”16 In these autobiographies, he re-creates his experiences accompanying Chicago police in their work, even as his colored photographs project the terrifying scenes in which violence and drug usage emerge out of shadows. Using tough vernacular dialogue, he evokes scenes in which the cops prove as violent as the crooks, and in which their credibility as law enforcers is undermined as they seek to set him up for sensationalized photographs. His reflections in Voices in the Mirror on his “assignment through the world of crime” lead him to “the realization that I had managed to escape it.” Parks’s concluding words not only ponder the inequities of the American prison system and capital punishment, but also muse more generally: “So many lives behind prison walls have been stopped forever. It is one thing to place the fault, another thing to point at where the fault lies.”17
In his autobiographies Parks voices the basic concerns that underlay his powerful photographs of the 1960s and 1970s. In Voices in the Mirror, he explains: “I have, for a long time, worked under the premise that everyone is worth something; that every life is valuable to our existence. Consequently, I’ve felt it was my camera’s responsibility to shed light on any condition that hinders human growth or warps the spirit of those trapped in the ruinous evils of poverty. It is not easy to do away with, whether its victims are black or white.”18 Thus through these socially transformative years, Parks used his camera to change the perceptions of Life’s readers regarding the lives of the poor and of black Americans as he used words and story to attempt the same ends in his autobiographies.
During the sixties, his photographic essays focused on images depicting the poverty and desperation of two families—in 1961 of Flavio da Silva’s family in Rio de Janeiro, and in 1967 of the Fontenelle family in Harlem. During these decades, he also focused on portraits of such distinguished and controversial African Americans as Duke Ellington, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Muhammad Ali, as well as on the lives and work of the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims. While his portrait photographs of well-known blacks have become iconic, Parks specifically explained that his photos of the Fontenelles derived from his attempt to answer the question posed to him by Life’s managing editor as to “why black people were rioting and why they were so discontent.”19 Parks’s recognition of the necessity of addressing social injustices stemming from racism and poverty as well as his profound commitment to civil rights and his hope for change is reflected in both the photographic essays of the unknown da Silva and Fontenelle families, as well as in the portraits depicting the notorious and newsworthy. In Born Black (1971), in which many of these photographs appear alongside his personal accounts of meeting the people in them, he explains his commitment: “I came to each story with a strong sense of involvement, finding it difficult to screen out my own memories of a scarred past. But I tried for truth, the kind that comes through looking and listening, through the careful sifting of day-to-day emotions that white America whips up in black people. My own background has enabled me, I hope, to better share the experiences of some other black people. I do not presume to speak for them. I have just offered a glimpse, however, fleeting, of their world through black eyes.”20
The impact of Parks’s photographs of the Fontenelle family and of Flavio da Silva and his family led to unanticipated and complicated repercussions, about which Parks writes with compassion. In the “Foreword” to Flavio (1979), in which he recounts the story of his relationship with the Brazilian boy from the time of their meeting through his later years, he describes the two families and his relationship to them, “The da Silvas and the Fontenelles lived across the world from one another, but they shared the same tragedy, a private tragedy but one at once very public—and I became caught up in their struggle to survive it.”21 Assigned by Life to report on “Poverty in Brazil,” Parks found his subject in a favela outside Rio—Flavio, a twelve-year-old boy, malnourished and suffering a deadly asthma, who had made himself the principal caretaker of his numerous brothers and sisters. His pictures of Flavio, his parents, his siblings, the shack where they lived with its crowded and filthy rooms exposed circumstances otherwise unimaginable to the middle-class American readers of Life. In the da Silva children’s spindly bodies, marked with sores, and in their anguished and win-some faces, he documented the experience of thousands of others. The readers of Life, moved by his pictures of the da Silva family in Brazil and the Fontenelle family in the United States, responded by funding new houses for them both, by finding new jobs for the adults, and by paying for Flavio to come to the United States for expensive and long-term medical treatment. Flavio was given the Christopher Award for the best biography in 1978, but in his compassionate narrative Parks questions himself about the role of himself and his photographs in “altering human lives.” Compellingly, he describes how the changes in the material circumstances of both families, which perhaps propelled them toward “improbable dreams,” contributed to subsequent tragedies in their lives.22
Parks’s autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree, published in 1963 and dedicated to his parents, however, inaugurated his second career as a writer and led to his choosing words as well as pictures as his weapons against racism and poverty. Identified as “a novel from life” on its title page, The Learning Tree was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and has gone through several printings, remaining available today. In beginning his narrative with a tornado, Parks follows a pattern established for Kansas-based novels by L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1937). The tornado in The Learning Tree, which affects both blacks and whites, is the means for the boy Newt Winger, Parks’s stand-in for himself, to begin to question the world from multiple perspectives. Although a tornado was not a part of Parks’s boyhood, many of the incidents and characters in The Learning Tree were directly drawn from his early years in Fort Scott, fictionalized as Cherokee Flats. The words of wisdom that Sarah Winger passes on to her son and by which Parks explains the title for The Learning Tree appear rephrased later in Voices in the Mirror, as words Parks’s own mother, Sarah, spoke to him: “I hope you won’t have to stay here all your life, Newt. It ain’t a all-good place and it ain’t a all-bad place. But you can learn just as much here about people and things as you can learn any place else. Cherokee Flats is sorta like a fruit tree. Some of the people are good and some of them are bad—just like the fruit on a tree…. No matter if you go or stay, think of it like that till the day you die—let it be your learnin’ tree.”23 As Parks himself was subjected to racial slurs and terrorized by whites in Kansas as a boy, so is Newt. Like other boys coming of age, he and his fictional counterpart also had to overcome the fear of death. Death in racist Kansas, however, was not only an existential situation; it was precipitated by racist law-enforcement officers. His parents’ steadfast love and capacity to dream a better life gives Newt the courage, as it did Parks, to prevail.
The shaping experiences in The Learning Tree form the springboard for Parks’s subsequent autobiographies—A Choice of Weapons (1965), To Smile in Autumn (1979), Voices in the Mirror (1990), Half Past Autumn (1997), A Hungry Heart: A Memoir (2005), as well as his movie based on The Learning Tree—with each autobiography taking him further forward as in an ongoing search for justice and creative means for understanding tragedy and beauty. In To Smile in Autumn he claims that he has “been born again and again” and that in Voices in the Mirror he has “lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me.”24 In A Choice of Weapons, at fifty-four, he explained how he survived his lonely and destitute years following his departure from Kansas and discovered his salvation in the camera; in To Smile in Autumn, at age sixty-seven, he can describe his success as photographer, cinematographer, and writer, a success that he balances against the tragic loss of his first son and namesake; in Voices in the Mirror, at age seventy-eight, watching his children and his grandchildren mature and embracing diverse creative endeavors, he attains an equanimity with failure, tragedy, time, death. In the “Epilogue” for this autobiography, he writes: “I still don’t know what compels me off into different directions. Perhaps the early years on the prairie have something to do with it—my putting a wetted finger up to catch the drifting of the wind, or the feel of oncoming rain or snow…. there were so many things to learn. Sometimes now, I go back to the prairie riverbanks to gaze into the water I envied for flowing off to places I would never see, but places I have been to since and learned from.”25 The 1997 retrospective exhibition of Parks’s photographic career at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., provided the basis for Half Past Autumn, his fifth autobiographical work, which allowed him to reflect on the intersection of words and photographs in the course of his long life. The exhibition toured the United States, and the book that accompanied it became the basis for an HBO documentary on his life. A Hungry Heart, published shortly before his death, depicts Parks as “a one-man wrecking crew of racial barriers,”26 yet also shows him as continuing his interest in discovering new ways of perceiving and expressing life’s wonders.
In 1981, Parks deviated from his autobiographical narratives to tell the story of an Irish American family in his second novel, Shannon. Spanning the twentieth century, Shannon is set in New York City, Parks’s adopted city. Emphasizing national, religious, and class conflict rather than racial discrimination, he traces the rise of the O’Farrell family, through the twentieth-century’s labor problems, to social prominence at the end of the century. As in his two books of photographic essays—Flavio and Born Black—The Learning Tree, and his autobiographically dictated works, Parks sustains an easy narrative style characterized by a keen sense of story, vivid character portrayals, precise images, and lively dialogue. In all of his written works, including the poetry that he increasingly wrote in his later years, Parks took his lesson from Roy Stryker and Richard Wright, balancing specific “words and images” with his large concerns for human problems and writing clearly and forcefully. Consequently, whether he himself is the principal figure in the narrative or whether it is another, his writings appeal to readers of diverse ages and backgrounds.
Given Parks’s understanding of the power of both narrative and image, it was perhaps inevitable that he would turn to cinema as a means of sharing his vision with an American audience. Three years after Life published his photographic essay on Flavio, Parks wrote the screenplay for and directed a twelve-minute film about the Brazilian boy. In 1968, his photographs of the Fontenelle family became the basis for a television documentary, titled Diary of a Harlem Family, for which he provided the narration and for which he received an Emmy Award for best TV documentary. In the same year, he directed the hour-long World of Piri Thomas, based on Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), a memoir of growing up in Harlem’s Puerto-Rican barrio. However, with his 1969 conversion of The Learning Tree into a film, Parks was catapulted into Hollywood work, which soon resulted in his gradual resignation from Life. The first African American to produce, direct, and write the screenplay and score for a film with a major studio (Warner Brothers), Parks returned once more to Fort Scott to another re-creation of the joys and traumas of his own boyhood. In 1989 The Learning Tree was designated one of twenty-five films to be placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. After The Learning Tree, Parks directed a trio of films for MGM—Shaft (1971), Shaft’s Big Score (1972), and The Super Cops (1974); “a grand leap from Kansas to the mean streets of New York,” he wrote, describing Shaft as “a noisy film about a black, suave, high-powered big-city detective.”27 These films, in which he explicitly sought to provide an alternative model for free-wheeling black masculinity, became international hits. He chose historical and more complex black heroes as the subjects for his subsequent films—Leadbelly (1976), the story of the great folk and blues singer; Solomon Northrup’s Odyssey (1984), a retelling of the narrative of a black freedman, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, from which he escaped after a twelve-year trial; and Martin (1989). Parks wrote the scripts for both Solomon Northrup’s Odyssey and Martin as well as the score for Martin, a five-act ballet devoted to Martin Luther King Jr. In 1990, Martin was shown on King’s birthday on national television.
Having learned to play his parents’ battered upright piano by ear at six, Parks was always moved by music—gospel and jazz, classical and popular, and since his early days in Minnesota, when he played piano and composed in order to live, he has been involved in making music, even developing his own system of notation. His travels to Europe expanded his interest in music, and his work with film allowed him to develop and express this interest more fully, adapting his film scores—notably for The Learning Tree and for Shaft’s Big Score—for separate release. His compositions include Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Piece for Cello and Orchestra, Five Piano Sonatas, and Celebrations for Sarah Ross and Andrew Jackson Parks in memory of his parents.
In 1968, Parks published Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera, the first of several books, including In Love (1971), Whispers of Intimate Things (1971), Moments without Proper Names (1975), Arias in Silence (1994), Glimpses Toward Infinity (1996), and Eyes with Winged Thoughts (2005), which, in their integration of his poetry with his imagistic color photographs, move decidedly away from social documentation and toward abstraction, from social tragedy toward natural beauty. Although his photographic essays in Life and his books, Born Black and Flavio, brought his words and his black-and-white pictures powerfully together in the middle of his career, A Poet and His Camera reveals Parks’s ongoing interest in creative experimentation and in synergistic aesthetic possibilities. In the “Foreword” to Arias in Silence, he explains the importance of this shift: “The pictures that have most persistently confronted my camera have been those of crime, racism and poverty. I was cut through by the jagged edges of all three. Yet I remain aware of imagery that lends itself to serenity and beauty, and here my camera has searched for nature’s evanescent splendors. Recording them was a matter of devout observance, a sort of metamorphosis through which I called upon things dear to me—poetry, music and the magic of water-color.”28 Identifying Parks in his preface for A Poet and His Camera as “one of the most remarkable living photographers” and as “a poet with his camera as well as with his pen,” Stephen Spender praises him for his “concentration on the image.”29 Focusing on single objects, blurring them to create movement, shadowing them to evoke mystery, or juxtaposing them against a contrasting background in this pioneering work, Parks provides pictorial images, which resonate and illuminate the lyrical, imagistic poems that accompany them and which muse on nature, love, and time.
In Parks’s two 1971 books—In Love and Whispers of Intimate Things—he shifted explicitly from Bresson’s “the decisive moment” to focus on beautiful moments in both word and picture. In Moments without Proper Names (1975), however, his poetry accompanies powerful images from his major photographic essays depicting the struggle characterizing African American life and contrasting with images of poignancy and wonder in the human and the natural world in the concluding pages. Philip Brookman maintains that since 1985 Parks “combined his external vision with his internal feelings to create an extended series of poetic, constructed landscapes.”30 These constructed landscapes have also been called “soulscapes” or “eye music.” Always in color, he positions a sculpture or one or more natural objects—a flower, a leaf, a shell, driftwood—against a background of one of his own oil and watercolor paintings—to create sumptuous, multilayered collages. Increasingly, his images evoke sea, land, and sky, with a sun or moon balancing the foregrounded object. Often photographing through glass, he achieves unusual lighting effects and depth. Drenched in color and texture, his recent works resemble Georgia O’Keeffe’s desert and flower paintings. A Star for Noon (2004) is devoted to nudes and is accompanied by a CD of his compositions. His poetic and imagistic constructions demonstrate his decision to use art—words, pictures, and music—as an explicit expression of peace and loveliness and an implicit expression against racism, poverty, and violence. He believes that “After working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, I have a right to show something beautiful as well…. It’s all there, and you’ve done only half the job if you don’t do that.”31
In his nineties, Parks was surrounded by his family—his three children (his oldest son, Gordon, also a photographer and filmmaker, died in 1979 on location in Kenya), their spouses, and several grandchildren. Divorced from his first wife, Sally, in 1961, he subsequently married Elizabeth Campbell in 1962, whom he divorced in 1973, and in 1973, he married Genevieve Young, whom he divorced in 1979. Calling his children and grandchildren “a gathering of fine jewels,” he rejoiced in the “jumble of bloodlines” reflected in his family, creating “the color of a rainbow.”32
A cosmopolitan, nonetheless Parks frequently and continually recognized the importance of the lessons gleaned in his formative years in Kansas and in Chicago. Increasingly as the master of diverse genres and media, he was referred to in public as a “Renaissance man,” although his son, David, insists that his success lay in his ease with all people, his ability to get “next to his subjects and to stay out of the way, … he keyed in on them rather than having them key in on him.”33 The concluding words of Half Past Autumn, however, suggest that Parks never rested on his laurels, that he remained vitally engaged in creativity and discovery: “Dreams keep moving in, and the desire is still there to devour them…. since my time is so short, there is no room for idleness. At the moment I’m painting, reworking an unfinished novel, editing verse, and composing a piano sonata that reflects the natures of my four children. Naturally, the camera moves in to have its say now and then…. At half past autumn I’m all roses, thorns, shadows, and dreams; still touching what exists … I keep moving; later is too late.”34 His honors and awards continued until his death; in 2002, he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame; several schools have been given his name.
In the “Epilogue” for Half Past Autumn, he states, “I still wait impatiently for that segregated graveyard to become a forgotten memory. Until then, the peace, hovering between me and my birthplace, will continue to be untrustworthy.”35 Although Fort Scott city officials had offered to move the African American graves to the hill where the white elite are buried, Parks demanded instead that the city carefully maintain the black cemetery, keeping it as a historical monument to Fort Scott’s stalwart black community. His son, David, reveals that prior to his death, Parks expressed his desire to go “home” to Kansas to be buried.36 Fort Scott had been working to make amends for its history of prejudice and injustice, recognizing Parks as its most distinguished citizen and in 2004 inaugurating the annual Gordon Parks Celebration of Culture and Diversity with scholarly lectures, exhibitions, musical tributes, trolley rides, and a film festival. The city has beautified “that segregated graveyard,” where Parks now makes peace with Kansas at last, resting there with his parents and extended family.
Throughout his long life, Parks revealed in words, pictures, and music his commitment to social activism. His work revealed as well his commitment to an aesthetic nurtured by contemplation, creativity, and experimentation. Often referred to as a “Renaissance man” and a cosmopolitan, he recognized the important lessons gleaned in his formative years in Kansas and in Chicago.
Gordon Parks died on March 7, 2006, at the age of 93, at his home in Manhattan. His funeral at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights was attended by family and associates such as former New York mayor David Dinkins, actor Avery Brooks, and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, as well as numerous photographers, no doubt many his professional heirs. Parks is buried near his parents in Fort Scott, Kansas.
1. Titling his first autobiography, A Choice of Weapons (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1965), Parks writes in his conclusion, “Poverty and bigotry would still be around, but at last I could fight them on even terms. The significant thing was a choice of weapons with which to fight them most effectively…. I would [choose] those of a mother who placed love, dignity and hard work over hatred” (274).
2. Hurd, Greg. “Fellow Kansans Honor Gordon Parks in Harlem.” Lawrence Journal World (June 18, 2004): 2D.
3. Parks, Gordon. A Poet and His Camera. New York: Viking Press, 1968, n.p.
4. Parks, Gordon. Half Past Autumn. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997, 12.
5. Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 232.
6. Ibid., 243–44.
7. Gates Jr., Henry Louis and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993, 26–27.
8. Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 178.
9. Ibid., 208, 212–13.
10. Ibid., 227.
11. Parks, Half Past Autumn, 92.
12. Ibid., 80.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 13.
15. Ibid., 102.
16. Parks, Gordon. Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1990, 171; Parks, Half Past Autumn, 180.
17. Parks, Voices in the Mirror, 178.
18. Ibid., 179–80.
19. Parks, Half Past Autumn, 228.
20. Parks, Gordon. Born Black. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1971, 12.
21. Parks, Gordon. Flavio. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979, 7.
22. Ibid., 7, 8.
23. Parks, Gordon. The Learning Tree. New York: Fawcett-Crest, 1963, 35–36.
24. Parks, Gordon. To Smile in Autumn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979, 247; Parks, Voices in the Mirror, 340.
25. Parks, Voices in the Mirror, 341.
26. Wranovics, John. “Weapon of Choice,” New York Times Book Review, January 8, 2006, 15.
27. Parks, Half Past Autumn, 320.
28. Parks, Gordon. Arias in Silence. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1994, n.p.
29. Spender, Stephen. “Preface,” Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera. New York: Viking Press, 1968, n.p.
30. Brookman, Philip. “Unlocked Doors: Gordon Parks at the Crossroads.” In Half Past Autumn, 352.
31. “Legends Online,” http://www.pdngallery.com/legends/parks/bio.shtml.
32. Parks, Half Past Autumn, 324, 326.
33. Rombeck, Terry. “Nearly Year after Father’s Death, Son Visits Father’s Boyhood Home.” Lawrence Journal World (January 18, 2007): 2D.
34. Parks, Half Past Autumn, 343.
35. Ibid.
36. Rombeck, Lawrence Journal World.
Brierly, Dean. “Renaissance Man: The Photography of Gordon Parks.” Camera and Darkroom 13 (December 1, 1991): 24.
Doherty, Thomas. “The Black Exploitation Picture: Superfly and Black Caesar.” Ball State University Forum 24.2 (1983): 30–39.
Henry, Matthew. “He Is a ‘Bad Mother’: Shaft and Contemporary Black Masculinity.” African American Review 38.1 (Spring 2004): 119–26.
Houston, Helen R. “Gordon Parks.” Notable Black American Men, edited by Jessie Carney Smith. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999.
Lyne, William. “No Accident: From Black Power to Black Box Office.” African American Review 34.1 (Spring 2000): 39–59.
Moore, Deedee. “Shooting Straight: The Many Worlds of Gordon Parks.” Smithsonian 20.1 (April 1989): 66–72, 74, 76–77.
Myers, Walter. “Gordon Parks: John Henry with a Camera.” Black Scholar 7 (January–February 1976): 26–30.
Paris, Michael. “Country Blues on the Screen: The Leadbelly Films.” Journal of American Studies 30.1 (April 1996): 119–25.
Parks, Gordon. Bare Witness. New York: Rizzoli, 2006.
———. Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture. New York: F. Watts, 1948.
———. “A Conversation with Gordon Parks.” With Martin H. Bush. In The Photographs of Gordon Parks. Wichita, Kans.: Wichita State University Press, 1983.
———. Eyes with Winged Thoughts. New York: Atria, 2005.
———. Flash Photography. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1947.
———. Glimpses Toward Infinity. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1996.
———. “Gordon Parks Interview.” With Maurice Peterson. Essence 3 (October 1972): 62.
———. “Gordon Parks Interview.” With Roy Campanella. Millimeter 4 (April 1976): 30–32.
———. A Hungry Heart: A Memoir. New York: Atria, 2005.
———. In Love. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971.
———. Moments Without Proper Names. New York: Viking Press, 1975.
———. Shannon. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1981.
———. A Star for Noon. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2004.
———. “A Talk with Gordon Parks.” With B. Thomas. Action 7 (July–August, 1972): 14–18.
———. Whispers of Intimate Things. New York: Viking Press, 1971.
Schultz, Elizabeth. “Dreams Deferred: The Personal Narratives of Four Black Kansans.” American Studies 34.2 (Fall 1993): 25–52.
Tidwell, John Edgar. “Gordon Parks and the Unending Quest for Self-Fulfillment.” In John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History, edited by Virgil Dean. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. 293–305.
Tidwell, John Edgar and Carmaletta Williams. “Coming of Age in the Land of Uncertainty.” Cottonwood 56 (2000): 42–59.