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Unforeseen Destiny Gordon Parks and the Work that Sparked His Award-Winning Career
THE STORY, THE Life
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He wasn’t supposed to live Park’s Life Prior to His Photography
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but he did
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“Unlocked Doors,” an essay on his most prominent work, American Gothic, 1942
and abundantly so.
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An appendix of Parks life and the many accomplishments that comprised it.
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He wasn’t supposed to live
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1912 Gordon Parks is born in Ft. Scott, Kansas. 1927 Sarah Parks dies, and Gordon moves to St. Paul, MN.
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He was stillborn— no heartbeat, declared dead by the family doctor, and put aside for later burial. But his life was nowhere near over. Another doctor in the delivery room, using both faith and an unexpected idea, immersed the newborn into ice-cold water. The shock from the coldness caused his heart to start beating, and the baby, Gordon Parks, was soon crying and
FULL NAME Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks
healthy. This moment, like many others in his life, required Parks’ endurance and tenacity, and as his life would soon reveal, these are this trait would lead him to a life of innovation and ingenuity, a blessed one, an unexpected destiny.
Gordon Parks was named after the doctor who saved his life at birth
LINEAGE Parks was the youngest of fifteen children by Sarah Parks and Andrew Jackson Parks.
1933 Marries Sally Alvis.
1937 Parks buys his first camera.
1937–42 Freelance Fashion Photographer
1942 Works for Farm Security Administration
1942 Works for Farm Security Administration 1943 Office of War Information photographer
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1944 First Black photographer at Vogue
1944–48 Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (SONJ) corporate photographer
Parks grew up poor in Fort Scott, Kansas. His mother died when Parks was only fifteen, and seeking to honor his mother’s wishes, his father sent him to live in the north with his older sister in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yet, her husband kicked him out soon afterwards, and Park was forced to drop out of high school and survive homeless and on the
* Some sources say that he was fourteen.
1947 Publishes Flash Photography (technical)
streets. For a long time, his life was filled with the horror of failure that his teachers’ had instilled in him. He thrived in multiple jobs in Minneapolis until age 25.
He was so down that he could only go up, and that is what he committed himself to do.
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He wasn’t supposed to live but he did
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1948–72 Life Magazine photojournalist
The photo clerks who developed Parks’ first roll of film prompted him to get a fashion assignment at Frank Murphy’s clothing store in St. Paul. Parks caught the eye of Marva Louis, heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis’ wife, who encouraged him to move to Chicago, where he began a portrait business for society women.
1961 Divorces wife
1962 Marries Elizabeth Campbell
Over the next few years, Parks developed a freelance portrait and fashion sideline and began to chronicle the city’s South Side black ghetto. In 1941, an exhibition of those won Parks a fellowship with the
1963 Publishes The Learning Tree
Farm Security Administration. Working as a trainee under Roy Stryker, Parks created one of his best known photographs, American Gothic, Washington, D.C.
THUS BEGAN PARK’S JOURNEY AS A PHOTOGRAPHY PIONEER.
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1968 Directs Emmy-award-winning Diary of a Harlem Family film
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1969 Directs The Learning Tree film
Unlocked Doors Gordon Parks at the Crossroads Text from essay by Philip Brookman in Park’s Half Past Autumn anthology
1970–73 Founding editor, Essence Magazine
1972 Awarded Spingarn Medal
1973 Divorces Liz Campbell and marries Genevieve Young
His first photographs of Washington were portraits of workers on the street and children in a housing project in the city’s neighborhood. Parks soon learned that capturing intolerance “was not so easy as I assumed it would be. “Then Stryker suggested that he speak to Ella Watson, a government char woman also working at the FSA. She became perhaps his most important subject. In August 1942, Parks listened as Watson told her story. “She had struggled alone after her mother had died and her father had been killed by a lynch mob,” he recalls.
“What’s more, the first child had been stricken with paralysis a year before its mother died. Now this woman was bringing up these grandchildren on a salary hardly suitable for one person.”
After hearing these words Parks asked if he could photograph her. He then exposed his first negatives of Watson, producing a series of images that today are icons of American culture. His first and best known picture of her is American Gothic, 1942. It shows a dignified and serious woman staring straight into Parks’s lens. His simple, geometric composition mimics her imperturbable stare. Looking
She had gone through high school, married and become pregnant. Her husband was accidentally shot to death two days before the daughter was born. By the time the daughter was eighteen she had given birth to two illegitimate children, dying two weeks after the second child’s birth.
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1974 Directs The Super Cops film
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1975 Publishes Moments without Proper Names poetry anthology
A humanistic connection— a strong relationship based on some form of mutual understanding— was made between the photographer and his subject. straight into her stolid eyes, one is drawn into her world, right through any stereotypical or prototypical barriers that might normally be established by her appearance. She is posed like the farmer in Grant Wood’s archetypal composition American Gothic, 1930, holding a broom and mop in place of the farmer’s pitchfork. Behind her, hanging from above and filling
the frame like a powerful, translucent beacon of irony, is the American flag. “Stryker thought it was just about the end,” remembers Parks. “He said, ‘My God, this can’t be published, but it’s a start.”
1976 Directs Leadbelly film
Clearly, a humanistic connection— a strong relationship based on some form of mutual understanding— was made between the photographer and his subject. It is apparent in this photograph that Parks, early in his career, was able to listen, understand, and silently convey his own compassion for Watson as a complex individual with a serious story to tell. It is Parks who posed Watson, who constructed the stark visual ambiguity of the
Ella Watson’s gaze out of this photograph is truly transcendent. One glimpse into her eyes reveals the depth of her understanding, of the dichotomy between beauty and tragedy, and the irony implied by the limp flag hanging over her head.
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1979 Divorces Genevieve Young
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1979 Publishes To Smile in Autumn
scene, and whose eyes met hers at the moment the portrait was made. She looks directly at him as he stands in for the rest of us who have since encountered her stare. Here, for the first time, he was able to surpass his own feelings to express his understanding of her experience. Consequently, this photograph has become a portrait of both America and one unique individual. “Photographing bigotry was, as Stryker had warned, very difficult,” wrote Parks. “The evil of its effect however, was discernable in the black faces of the oppressed and their blighted neighborhood lying within the shadows of the Capitol. It was in
1981 Publishes Shannon
those shadows that the charwoman lived, and I followed her through them—to her dark house, her storefront church; to her small happinesses and daily frustrations.” Parks continued to photograph Watson and her family during
1984 Publishes The Odyssey of Solomon
the ensuing months. Following on the heels of his project about poverty in Chicago’s south side, her story became his second sustained photographic essay. Watson was for him symbolic of the oppression he experienced—both in Washington
Watson was for him symbolic of the oppression he experienced—both in Washington and in Kansas as a child, yet Parks sought to picture her life as one filled with love and spirituality as wwell as one fraught with difficulty.
1974 Directs The Super Cops film
1975 Publishes Moments without Proper Names poetry anthology
1976 Directs Leadbelly film
It was in those shadows that the charwoman lived, and I followed her through them—to her dark house, her storefront church; to her small happinesses and daily frustrations.”
photograph is divided into binary sections that each convey different impressions. The tension between these parts creates a meaningful narrative that begs questions about her past and the unknowable future awaiting her grandchildren.
and in Kansas as a child—yet Parks sought to picture her life as one filled with love and spirituality as well as one fraught with difficulty. He accompanied her between work and home and photographed her environment: her apartment, street, church, and grocery store. He also depicted her adopted daughter and young grandchildren growing up in this segregated environment,
On the left side of this picture Watson sits in her kitchen surrounded by the kids. She has just finished feeding them and everyone is relaxing, lost in thought on a hot summer evening. This domestic scene might be one from a play, framed by curtains on the left and the vertical door frame on the right. The lighting is also theatrical. As Parks looks in with his camera
creating a framework for investigating the effects of bigotry on one family and showing the various ways they had risen above them. One of the most complex and enlightening of these images is Ella Watson and Her Grandchildren, August 1942. This multilayered image cleverly unveils four generations of Watson’s family together in her home. The
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1974 Directs The Super Cops film
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1975 Publishes Moments without Proper Names poetry anthology
from outside the room, their space seems to recede illusionistically like a stage set. One sees right through to the back door and into the August twilight. The family is posed as though in a painting; Watson cradles her youngest grandchild on her lap, recalling innumerable works of art throughout history that depict a mother and child, symbols of birth hope for the future. Parks’s photograph is bisected vertically by the geometry of the kitchen door. While the left side portrays the family realistically—they are posed much in the spirit of 1930s documentary representation—the right side emerges like an otherworldly dream,
a translucent reflection of, or counterpoint to, the theatrically constructed scene opposite. Watson’s adopted daughter appears as an apparition in a hazy mirror. She is relaxed and seated, yet seems to hover within its frame. The introspective look on the daughter’s face mirrors that of Watson herself, she symbolizes a young Ella daydreaming about her future. Indeed, the daughter is smiling and looking directly at a framed photograph of an elegantly dressed
1988 Awarded National Medal of Arts
couple who are, as Parks remembers, Watson’s parents. They appear as a page from her family album that, after so much tragedy, emotionally connects the different people in the picture. These astutely composed links bring together each generation of the family as one, echoing Parks’s portrayal of Watson as an individual with a past and a future, dreams and a harshly real present.
The photograph collapses four generations into a complex tableau that represents both individual and collective experience.
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After a fruitful career of sharing America’s deepest culture, Parks is remembered for his activism, filmmaking, photography, and writings. Parks was a co-founder of Essence magazine and one of the early contributors to the blaxploitation genre in film. He is credited with many books and has influenced many film-makers, photographers, and artists who have thus succeeded him.
Parks constantly strived through various media to make freedom the theme of all of his works.
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He wasn’t su
upposed to live but he did and abundantly so
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JOBS
Creative 28
Municipal
Custodial
PRE-CAREER
Civilian Conservation Corpsman Lumberjack
Busboy Porter Waiter Bartender Ranch hand
EARLY CAREER
Piano player in a bordello Freelance photographer Fashion photographer Band leader Orchestra musician
Photographer Film Director Author Poet Humanitarian Activist
LIFE MAGAZINE AND BEYOND
To praise someone as a “Renaissance Man� is to resort to one of the most overused cliches, but in the case of Gordon Parks, the phrase is hardly avoidable. Successful as a novelist, poet, movie director, composer, and musician, Parks perhaps remains best known as a photographer because of his years with Life magazine and his particular mastery of the photo-essay.
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Non- Photographic Works
BOOKS AND COMPILATIONS 1947 1948
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1964 1967 1970
Flash Photography Camera Portraits: Techniques of Documentary Portraiture The Learning Tree A Choice of Weapons Born Black
1975 1979
Proper Names To Smile in Autumn
1990 2000 2003 2005 2005
Voices in the Mirror A Star for Noon The Sun Stalker A Hungry Heart Eyes With Winged Thoughts Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things
FILM 1964 Flavio 1968 Diary of a Harlem Family 1968 The World of Piri Thomas 1969 The Learning Tree 1971 Shaft
1972 Shaft’s Big Score 1974 The Super Cops 1976 Leadbelly
FILM
MUSIC AND THEATER NON- PHOTOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHIC
MUSIC AND THEATER 1987 Moments Without Proper Names 1989 Martin (Martin Luther King) ballet
BOOKS AND COMPILATIONS PHOTOGRAPHY
comparison of work categories
awards 1941 Julius Rosenwald Fellowship 1961 Photographer of the Year by ASMD 1966 Notable Book award 1968 Emmy Award 1972 Springarn Medal 1978 Christopher Award for Flavio photoessay 1984 Honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Thiel College 1988 National Medal of Arts Award 1989 The Learning Tree film is deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” 1990 National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame 1996 “The Gordon Parks Collection”curration 1996 Honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of D.C. 1998 American National Medal of the Arts by National Endowment of the Arts 2000 Shaft is deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” 2002 Jackie Robinson Foundation’s Life Achievement Award. 2004 Honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters
BOOKS AND COMPILATIONS
FILM
MUSIC AND THEATER
AWARDS WORKS
PHOTOGRAPHY
Categorical comparison of awards vs works
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bibliography
films
Berry, S.L. Gordon Parks. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1991
1971
Bush, Martin H. The Photographs of Gordon Parks. Wichita, Kansas: Wichita State University, 1983. Donloe, Darlene. Gordon Parks: Photographer, Writer, Composer, Film Maker [Melrose Square Black American series]. Los Angeles: Melrose Square Publishing Company, 1991 Parr, Ann, and Gordon Parks. Gordon Parks: No Excuses. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2006. Stange, Maren. Bare Witness: photographs by Gordon Parks. Milan: Skira, 2006. Turk, Midge, and Herbert Danska. Gordon Parks. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1971.
Soul in Cinema: Filming Shaft on Location 1986 Passion and Memory 1994 Malcolm X: Make it Plain 1996 All Power to the People 2000 Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks 2002 Baadasssss Cinema 2003 Soul Man: Isaac Hayes
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Unexpected Destiny This book was designed by De Andrea Nichols at the Sam Fox School of Design in St. Louis, MO. Fall 2009
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