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More Photos
By GORDON PARKS
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GORDON PARKS American (1912-2006)
From the age of fifteen, Gordon
Parks was already a writer and a musician interested in photography. He would
eventually become well known for his work in the Farm Security Administration
(FSA), the U.S. Office of War Information, and as a staff photographer for
Life. His talents
in the arts also extended to directing films. As a young black man, Parks
could only find difficult and odd jobs such as herding cattle and carrying
bricks. He would later insist that it was the memory of his family's
closeness that sustained him.
Parks decided to be a photographer in
1937 after he saw a film depicting the sinking of the U.S.S. Panay in China.
At this time, he was working as a waiter for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Parks
went back to Seattle and promptly bought his first camera, and the Kodak
shop which developed his film gave him his first show. He was fired from
Northern Pacific after getting into an altercation with a white man, but
soon got his first professional job working as a fashion photographer for
a store by the name of Murphy's in St. Paul, Minnesota (Bush, 9-14). Photographing
the models at Murphy's marked the start of Parks' experience working in the
fashion industry.
In 1941 Parks won a Julius Rosenwald
fellowship for his photographic work at Chicago's South Side Community Art
Center. In the same year he chose to work for Roy Stryker at the Farm Security
Administration. It was there he “learned how to fight the evil of poverty – along with the evil of
racism – with a camera” (Bush, 38). One of his first and most well known
pictures he took in the nation's capital was “American Gothic,” 1942. The
subject of the photo, framed by a mop, a broom, and the American flag, was
a charwoman by the name of Ella Watson, also working at the FSA. Watson
had lived a rough and tragic life marred by violent racism and poverty. After
hearing her story, it was Parks who posed her and sought to compose a narrative
of her experience through the use of his camera (Brookman, 33 ; 348-349).
In accordance with the FSA's mission, he traveled through various parts of
the U.S., recording the Depression's impact on culture and society.
By 1943, the FSA was disbanded. Both Parks and Stryker were transferred
to the Office of War Information (OWI). Parks was scheduled to accompany
black troops overseas, but the assignment was abruptly cancelled. It
was said that an unnamed politician from the South did not want too much publicity
for black soldiers. Stryker and Parks soon moved on to the Standard
Oil Company, which sponsored a large photo documentary project.
Though
it was designed to combat the company's infamous reputation for discriminatory
policies, the program was not a huge success for Standard Oil . Ironically,
Parks was still subjected to anti-black sentiment (Bush, 49-50; 56).
He was eventually laid off by his longtime mentor and employer, Roy Stryker.
Parks had never forgotten his interest and talent in fashion photography.
Alexey Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar admired his fashion pictures,
and promptly said that due to being a William Randolph Hearst publication,
they could not hire any black staff members. Nevertheless, Parks went on to
freelance for Vogue and Glamour ,
and established his reputation as a superior fashion photographer (Brookman,
76). This experience served him well when Life assigned him
to cover the French collections in Paris, despite the fact he had been with
the magazine for only eighteen months (Bush, 99).
Along with major fashion contributions, Parks photographed dozens of noteworthy
people for Life ; among them were Ingrid Bergman, Dwight Eisenhower,
Winston Churchill, Grace Kelley, Louis Armstrong, Paul Newman, and Muhammad
Ali. Parks' extraordinary documentary work chronicled poverty, crime,
school segregation, Communist demonstrations, the return of U.S. Korean
War veterans, the Civil Rights movement, and the Black Panthers. During
his tenure at Life , Parks covered everything from the latest fashions
in women's garters to prison riots in New Jersey (Bush, 128-134).
In 1969, Parks directed his first film, The Learning Tree. Four
additional films followed: Shaft (1971), Shaft's Big Score (1972), The
Super Cops (1974), and Leadbelly (1976) (Bush, 127). During
this time, from 1970-1973, the man who had become known as “The Poet and His
Camera” was the editorial director for Essence magazine (Auer).
During his entire career and throughout
the last decade of his life, Parks continued to write, paint, compose, and
photograph. Looking back on his success, he recalled a white schoolteacher
who instructed him and his classmates not to bother with college, since they
would all end up as “porters and maids” anyway.
Though he was grateful to have proven her wrong, he acknowledged that he never
made peace with the memories of his birthplace. Parks impatiently waited “for
that segregated graveyard to become a forgotten memory” (Brookman, 343).
BIBLIOGRAPHY Photographers Encyclopedia International: 1839 to the
Present, L-Z. Michèle
and Michel Auer. 1985. Editions Camera Obscura.
The Photographs of Gordon Parks. Martin H. Bush. 1983. Wichita State University.
Gordon Parks: Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective. Philip
Brookman. 1997. Bulfinch Press, Little, Brown and Co.
Roy Stryker: USA 1943-1950. Steven W. Plattner and Cornell Capa. 1983. University
of Texas Press.
LIFE Photographers: Their Careers and Favorite Pictures. Stanley Rayfield.
1957. Doubleday and Co. |
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