Parks, Gordon, Sr.

Source:

 African American National Biography

Parks, Gordon, Sr.

(20 Nov. 1912–7 March 2006),

photographer, filmmaker, author, and composer, was born Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks in the small prairie town of Fort Scott, Kansas, to Andrew Jackson Parks, a dirt farmer, and Sarah Ross, a maid. Gordon was the youngest of fifteen children, the first five of which, he later discovered, were really half siblings, born to his father and a woman other than his mother. Parks's poor Kansas childhood, and his memories of its unbridled racism, feature prominently in his later work, especially his books “thick with those memories.” The first phase of Parks's life ended with the death of his mother in 1928. “Before

Gordon Parks Sr. directs a scene of the film The Learning Tree in December 1968. (AP Images.)

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the flowers on my mother's grave had wilted,” Parks remembered, “my father had me on a train to my sister in Minnesota. I ran into some hell there” (Russell, 145). Within a month of his arrival in-Minneapolis–St. Paul, Gordon's brother-in-law kicked him out of the house, forcing him to survive the winter by riding the light-rail cars at night and hanging out in pool halls during the day. High school was merely a place to stay out of the cold, and Parks soon dropped out. Years later Parks dedicated one of his forty-six honorary degrees to his high school teacher who counseled her black students, “Don't bother to go to college and spend your mother's and father's money, because you're gonna be porters and maids” (Russell, 145).

For a while, at least, that teacher was right. Parks worked as a waiter and busboy, first at the Minnesota Club and later at the Hotel Lowry, where he catered to white patrons and met musicians in the big bands. Having taught himself to play by ear, Parks began composing songs and landed a job playing piano in a St. Paul brothel. Invited to join a touring orchestra, Parks arrived in Harlem in March 1933. The group, however, disbanded almost immediately, and he was stranded without a job. After making a few deliveries for a dope dealer, he joined the newly established Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), planting trees and clearing camping grounds and beaches until July 1934.

While in the CCC, Parks met and married Sally Alvis. The couple moved back to Minneapolis and had three children, Gordon Parks Jr., Toni, and David. Parks returned to playing piano and waiting tables until 1935, when he was hired by the North Coast Limited railroad. A discarded magazine featuring the work of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Rothstein captured Parks's attention. After visiting the Art Institute of Chicago on a layover and watching a newsreel of the 1937 sinking of USS Panay taken by photojournalist Norman Alley, who was present at the screening, Parks bought his first camera, a Voightlander Brilliant, at a Seattle pawnshop.

After Parks was fired following a racial incident provoked by a white steward, he played for a season as a semiprofessional basketball player with the House of David team before being hired by the Chicago and Northwestern Railway. Parks photographed while on the road and regularly contributed to the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder, and in February 1938 he had his first exhibition in the window of a Minneapolis Eastman Kodak store. Parks's personal charisma and his eye for beauty—in women and line—led him to fashion photography. At the urging of Marva Louis, Joe Louis's wife, Parks moved his family to Chicago, where he photographed fashions and did portrait work for both black and white clients. In what would become a lifelong pattern, he divided his time between these glamorous subjects and photojournalism. In Chicago he documented the devastating effects of poverty, accompanied the FSA photographer Jack Delano on several assignments, and shadowed Edwin Rosskam during preparation-for the book 12 Million Black Voices, for which Richard Wright wrote the text. The book proved a powerful influence on Parks's work, especially in shaping his approach to the relationship of word and image and the sequencing and juxtaposing of images.

When Parks won a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941, the first ever awarded in photography, he arranged for an apprenticeship at the FSA in Washington, D.C., under Roy Emerson Stryker. Parks and his family were not prepared for the racism they encountered upon their arrival in the nation's capital. “You have to get at the source of their bigotry, and that's not easy,” Stryker counseled Parks. “The camera becomes a powerful weapon” (Parks, 1997, 32). Stryker sent Parks to research the FSA photo files and suggested that he talk with Ella Watson, an African American cleaning woman who worked in the building. Among the series of photos Parks took of Watson and her family was a posed image of Watson standing in front of an American flag with a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. The photo, later dubbed “American Gothic,” referencing Grant Wood's 1930 painting of the same name, was Parks's first official FSA photo, and it became one of photography's iconic images.

Stryker sent Parks on assignment in New England, upstate New York, and Washington, D.C, and, in August 1943, to photograph Richard Wright in Harlem. When the FSA was disbanded in 1943, Parks went with Stryker to the Office of War Information (OWI), for which he photographed the military's first black fighter pilots under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. In 1944 Parks resigned and moved to Harlem, looking for work in fashion photography. Through Edward Steichen, he was hired by Glamour and then Vogue. From 1944 to 1948 he also worked for Stryker at Standard Oil of New Jersey, which had launched a photography project established to document American life.

Parks's photographic style—unsentimental, confident, and graphically strong—was already established, and in 1947 he published his first book, a how-to volume entitled Flash Photography. The next year he followed with Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture, which included, among others, portraits of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Ralph Ellison.

In 1948 Parks talked his way into a job at Life magazine, the nation's most popular and influential general interest magazine. Life's first black staff photographer, Parks remained with the magazine for over twenty years, completing more than three hundred assignments and fifteen magazine covers. His first assignments, balancing the disparate worlds of fashion and a photo essay centering on the sixteen-year-old Harlem gang leader Red Jackson, were illustrative of the range of his Life career. After eighteen months Parks was assigned to Life's Paris bureau for two years. Over the years, Parks photographed cowboys and priests, movie stars and royalty, Broadway shows and the emerging world of television, international events and political campaigns, fashion shows and the daily lives of Americans. “Tyrants, dictators, dethroned kings, beggars, queens, harlots, priests, the uplifting and the despoilers,” recalled Parks, “all stared into my camera with eyes that were unveiled. The camera revealed them as they were—human beings imprisoned inside themselves” (Parks, 1997, 13). Lauded for his portraits, Parks photographed such leading personalities as Althea Gibson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Sidney Bechet, Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, Barbra Streisand, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Meanwhile, Parks was producing photo essays on social issues, and by the 1960s he had become one of the country's most respected and influential photojournalists. In 1956 Parks documented the effects of segregation on one family in the photo essay “Segregation in the Deep South, Choctaw County, Alabama.” Over the next few years, he continued to tackle America's underbelly with “Segregation in the North,” “Crime across America,” and “Unemployment in Philadelphia.” “Freedom's Fearful Foe: Poverty,” published in the 16 June 1961 issue of Life and arguably Parks's most influential photo essay, was originally slated for only one photo. The stark photos of an ailing and malnourished Brazilian boy, Flavio de Silva of Rio de Janeiro, prompted a spontaneous response from American readers, who sent in thirty thousand dollars. Several years later when Life's editor Phil Kunhardt asked, “Why are black people rioting in the middle of America,” Parks responded by moving in with the Fontenelle family in Harlem for one week. The result was “Poverty in Harlem,” a groundbreaking photo essay published in 1968.

“Life magazine was very good about not assigning me ‘black stories,’” Parks always maintained. He did, however, cover—in word and image—the significant figures and events of the civil rights and Black Power movements, joining Charlie Moore, Moneta Sleet, Robert Haggins, Jonathan Eubanks, Jack T. Franklin, and Ernest Withers as one of the most significant documentarians of the period. In 1963 he published major stories on the March on Washington and on black Muslims. Following Malcolm X's assassination two years later, Parks published the photo essay “Death of Malcolm X,” after which, on the recommendation of the FBI, who took seriously threats from the Nation of Islam, the Parks family was sent overseas for a short time. As the decade progressed, Parks photographed Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Cleaver and Eldridge Cleaver, and Muhammad Ali, covered the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., and spent three weeks with the Black Panthers in Berkeley, California.

Unpretentious, spare, and straightforward, Parks's photographs belie the formal rigor of their construction. Parks's careful attention to the strategic possibilities of space and light, and his decisive use of objects and signs, both literal and poetic, produced a lifetime of rich images. As his photographic career progressed, Parks became increasingly interested in color and abstraction, and by the 1980s he was exhibiting paintings and works in other media as well as color photographs.

In 1963, encouraged by his friend and Life photographer Carl Mydans, who chided, “Man you've got a novel in you,” Parks published The Learning Tree, a novel based on his Kansas childhood. The book became a best-seller, and Life commissioned a series of photographs that it published alongside Parks's essay “How It Feels to Be Black.” With help from the filmmaker John Cassavetes, Parks wrote, directed, and scored a Hollywood film based on the book in 1969. Thirty years later the film was among the twenty-five films placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Parks's first films, documentaries made in the mid- to late 1960s, had grown out of Life stories: Flavio (1964), Diary of a Harlem Family (1968), and The World of Piri Thomas (1968). After the success of The Learning Tree, he entered the arena of popular fiction film with Shaft (1971), starring Richard Roundtree. Shaft's Big Score! (1972) and The Super Cops (1974) followed. Parks returned to documentary filmmaking with Leadbelly (1976) and Solomon Northup's Odyssey (1984).

Parks published three full-length autobiographies, in 1966, 1979, and 1990. He was one of the founders of Essence magazine, serving as editorial director from 1970 to 1973, during which time he published Born Black (1971), a collection of essays. The Weapons of Gordon Parks, a television adaptation of his earliest memoir, was presented on network television in 1969. Parks combined photographs and poetry in A Poet and His Camera (1968), Whispers of Intimate Things (1971), In Love (1971), Moments without Proper Names (1975), Aries in Silence (1994), and Glimpses toward Infinity (1996). Other publications included two historical novels, Shannon (1981), set in New York during World War I, and The Sun Stalkers (2003), based on the life of the painter Joseph M. W. Turner. Parks also produced an autobiographical film, Gordon Parks: Moments without Proper Names, which aired in 1988.

In addition to his photographic, film, and literary work, Parks continued playing and composing music, including several classical compositions. Beginning with The Learning Tree, he wrote several film scores, some of which were released as independent albums. In 1989 he wrote the libretto and music for Martin, a ballet based on the life of Martin Luther King Jr., which he later put on film.

In 1961 Parks and Sally Alvis divorced. Two years later he married Elizabeth Campbell, daughter of the pioneering black cartoonist Elmer “E. Simms” Campbell. The couple had a daughter, Leslie, and divorced in 1973. The same year he married Genevieve Young, his editor at Harper and Row. The couple divorced in 1979, the same year that his son, Gordon Parks Jr., director of the film Superfly, was killed in a plane crash at the age of forty-four.

Parks was awarded the NAACP's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, in 1972, and a National Medal of Arts in 1988. In 1997 the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized Half Past Autumn, the first major museum retrospective of Parks's work. Described by Parks as a “a tone-poem,” the exhibition, which traveled through 2003 to ten major cities, included more than two hundred photographs, as well as films, novels, poetry, and music. A companion documentary of the same name, coproduced by Denzel Washington, aired on HBO in 2000. Parks wrote the exhibition's accompanying book, dedicating it “For Momma and Poppa I stay drenched in the showers of their love.” Parks died in his home in Manhattan on 7 March 2006. He was ninety-three.

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