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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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