Photo by Frank Beacham
Gordon Parks was born 110 years ago today.
Parks was a photographer, musician, writer and film director. He is best remembered for his photographic essays for Life magazine and as the director of the 1971 film, Shaft.
Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was the son of Sarah and Jackson Parks. He was the last child born to them. His father was a farmer who grew corn, beets, turnips, potatoes, collard greens and tomatoes. They also had a few ducks, chickens and hogs.
Parks attended a segregated elementary school. The town was too small to afford a separate high school that would facilitate segregation of the secondary school, but blacks were not allowed to play sports or attend school social activities. Blacks were also discouraged from developing any aspirations for higher education.
Parks related in a documentary on his life that his teacher told him that his desire to go to college would be a waste of money. When Parks was eleven years old, three white boys threw him into the Marmaton River, knowing he couldn't swim. He had the presence of mind to duck underwater so they wouldn't see him make it to land.
His mother died when he was fourteen. He spent his last night at the family home sleeping beside his mother's coffin, seeking not only solace, but a way to face his own fear of death. At this time, he left home, being sent to live with other relatives. That situation ended with Parks being turned out onto the street to fend for himself.
In 1929, Parks briefly worked in a gentlemen's club, the Minnesota Club. There he not only observed the trappings of success, but was able to read many books from the club library. When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought an end to the club, he jumped a train to Chicago, where he managed to land a job in a flophouse.
At the age of twenty-five, Parks was struck by photographs of migrant workers in a magazine and bought his first camera, a Voigtländer Brillant, for $12.50 at a pawnshop in Seattle, Washington.
The photography clerks who developed Parks' first roll of film, applauded his work and prompted him to seek a fashion assignment at a women's clothing store in St. Paul, Minnesota, that was owned by Frank Murphy.
Those photographs caught the eye of Marva Louis, the elegant wife of heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis. She encouraged Parks to move to Chicago in 1940, where he began a portrait business and specialized in photographs of society women.
Over the next few years, Parks moved from job to job, developing a freelance portrait and fashion photographer sideline. He began to chronicle the city's South Side black ghetto and, in 1941, an exhibition of those photographs won Parks a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA).
Working as a trainee under Roy Stryker, Parks created one of his best-known photographs, American Gothic, Washington, D.C. named after the iconic Grant Wood painting, American Gothic.
The photograph shows a black woman, Ella Watson, who worked on the cleaning crew of the FSA building, standing stiffly in front of an American flag hanging on the wall, a broom in one hand and a mop in the background. Parks had been inspired to create the image after encountering racism repeatedly in restaurants and shops in the segregated capitol city.
A later photograph in the FSA series by Parks shows Ella Watson and her family.
Upon viewing the photograph, Stryker said that it was an indictment of America, and that it could get all of his photographers fired. He urged Parks to keep working with Watson, however, which led to a series of photographs of her daily life.
Parks said later that his first image was overdone and not subtle. Other commentators have argued that it drew strength from its polemical nature and its duality of victim and survivor, and so has affected far more people than his subsequent pictures of Mrs. Watson. After the FSA disbanded, Parks remained in Washington, D.C. as a correspondent with the Office of War Information. Disgusted with the prejudice he encountered, he resigned in 1944.
Moving to Harlem, Parks became a freelance fashion photographer for Vogue. He later followed Stryker to the Standard Oil Photography Project in New Jersey, which assigned photographers to take pictures of small towns and industrial centers.
The most striking work by Parks during that period included, Dinner Time at Mr. Hercules Brown's Home, Somerville, Maine (1944); Grease Plant Worker, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1946); Car Loaded with Furniture on Highway (1945); and Ferry Commuters, Staten Island, N.Y. (1946).
Parks renewed his search for photography jobs in the fashion world. Despite racist attitudes of the day, the Vogue editor, Alexander Liberman, hired him to shoot a collection of evening gowns.
Parks photographed fashion for Vogue for the next few years and he developed the distinctive style of photographing his models in motion rather than poised. During this time, he published his first two books, Flash Photography (1947) and Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948).
A 1948 photographic essay on a young Harlem gang leader won Parks a staff job as a photographer and writer with Life magazine. For twenty years, Parks produced photographs on subjects including fashion, sports, Broadway, poverty and racial segregation, as well as portraits of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali and Barbra Streisand.
He became one of the most provocative and celebrated photojournalists in the United States. In the 1950s, Parks worked as a consultant on various Hollywood productions. He later directed a series of documentaries on black ghetto life that were commissioned by National Educational Television.
With his film adaptation of his autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree in 1969, Parks became Hollywood's first major black director. It was filmed in his home town of Fort Scott, Kansas. Parks also wrote the screenplay and composed the musical score for the film.
Shaft, a 1971 detective film by Parks starring Richard Roundtree, became a major hit that spawned a series of films that would be labeled as, blaxploitation. Parks' feel for settings was confirmed by Shaft, with its portrayal of the super-cool leather-clad, black private detective hired to find the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem racketeer.
Parks also directed the 1972 sequel, Shaft's Big Score, in which the protagonist finds himself caught in the middle of rival gangs of racketeers. Parks's other directorial credits include The Super Cops (1974) and Leadbelly (1976), a biopic of the blues musician, Huddie Ledbetter.
In the 1980s, he made several films for television and composed the music and a libretto for Martin, a ballet tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., which premiered in Washington, D.C. during 1989. It was screened on national television on King's birthday in 1990.
In 2000, as an homage, he had a cameo appearance in the Shaft sequel that starred Samuel L. Jackson in the title role as the namesake and nephew of the original John Shaft. In the cameo scene, Parks was sitting playing chess when Jackson greeted him as, "Mr. P." His first job was as a piano player in a brothel when he was a teenager. Parks also performed as a jazz pianist.
His song "No Love," composed in another brothel, was performed during a national radio broadcast by Larry Funk and his orchestra in the early 1930s. Parks composed Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1953) at the encouragement of black American conductor, Dean Dixon, and his wife Vivian, a pianist, and with the help of the composer, Henry Brant.
He completed Tree Symphony in 1967. In 1989, he composed and choreographed Martin, a ballet dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader who had been assassinated.
Beginning in the 1960s, Parks branched out into literature, writing The Learning Tree (1963). He authored several books of poetry, which he illustrated with his own photographs, and he wrote three volumes of memoirs.
Gordon Parks received more than twenty honorary doctorates in his lifetime.
He died of cancer at the age of 93 while living in Manhattan, and is buried in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas.
He was profiled in the 1967 documentary, "Weapons of Gordon Parks." The film was made by American filmmaker, Warren Forma.
American Gothic, Washington, D.C., 1942
Photo by Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks: A Personal Remembrance
In 1983, I was one of the very few Betacam owners in the United States. Rick Smolen and David Cohen were preparing to host 50 of the world’s best photographers in Hawaii in December, 1983. They were to photograph the entire state in a single day.
In additional to publishing a book, Smolen and Cohen wanted to do a television documentary on the photo shoot. I was recommended when they called Sony to inquire about who had the new one-piece camera recorder. As a result of that call, I was hired for a dream job — one that is still hard to believe to this day.
I would not only teach some of the world’s best photographers to use the Betacam, I would shoot footage myself for the documentary. But the deal even got better. I would work with two photographic legends — Gordon Parks, who would direct, and Douglas Kirkland, who would produce the show.
Parks was already one of the world’s great photographers and filmmakers and Kirkland had been a staff photographer for both Look and Life magazines. He had become famous for his amazing 1961 photos of Marilyn Monroe.
I flew to Hawaii in late November to prepare for the big day, which would be Dec. 2, 1983. Home base was beach-front hotels in Honolulu. We began work immediately.
The easy part was teaching the photographers to use the Betacam. Most, in less than an hour, were better than the network photographers I was already working with. With this group, I learned that a great eye with one camera easily translates to another. This was world-class talent!
Gordon Parks, the legend that he was, was a real taskmaster. I did things for him I would never have done for lesser mortals. One very vivid memory was one of scariest shots of my life.
Gordon had me lay down on a runway at the Honolulu airport and shoot up as a 747 landed only a few feet above my head. It was terrifying, to say the least, but I got the shot and Gordon was pleased. That was all that mattered to me.
After that ritual, we bonded, ate together and he began telling me stories of his extraordinary life and work. This went on for an entire week. We were normally joined by Doug Kirkland, who was equally adept at storytelling. Learning from these masters was something I would never forget.
The day of the big photo shoot, I was pulled in a thousand directions. We had a fleet of 18 helicopters and my day was booked from sunrise shots early in the morning straight up until midnight. We crisscrossed Hawaii. I rolled hours of video tape on every conceivable subject.
It was exhausting, but exhilarating. On that day 64,800 still images were shot. The book had 345 of them — one including our Betacam crew.
The photo coffee table book was published as “A Day in the Life of Hawaii” and the documentary we made aired on public television for years to come.
For me, it was and remains one of the most exciting projects of my life.
Here, Gordon Parks and myself on the last day of our trip, in December, 1983
The Betacam crew, 1983