By Donna Rae Wisor
For The Examiner
January 9, 2009
A portrait of Parks in his “autumn years,” with hand on face, a head of billowy white hair and signature mustache, reveal a man in a crackling season---just before spring. His point of view from behind a camera, his “weapon of choice,” rose far above the heap of racism and poverty that were his adversaries. The photographic, cinematic, literary and musical works of Gordon Roger Alexander Buchannan Parks (b. 1912 – d. 2006) look toward a horizon without boundaries, to freedom.
The Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET) will exhibit his works from Jan. 17- April 12, with an opening reception on Friday, Jan. 16, from 6 to 8 p.m.. Philip Brookman, chief curator and head of research at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. will lecture.
“He was an inspiration for many generations of people, and not only artists," Brookman said in a USA Today interview in 2006. "As someone who grew up in an environment of poverty and racism, he made it his mission to end that, and he used art as a weapon to do it."
The son of a Kansas dirt farmer was not severely daunted in 1941, at the age of 28, by comments from Editor Alexey Brodovitch of Harper's Bazaar. Brodovitch said he admired Parks’ fashion pictures, but could not hire people of color due to being a William Randolph Hearst publication.
Why should he be daunted? Parks had been homeless and starving in Chicago before he worked as a busboy at a country club, he was nearly murdered while working as a porter at a flophouse and as a piano player in a brothel. He almost froze to death riding the ‘rails’ to New York where fate would have him join an all white orchestra. It didn’t last long though; the leader absconded with their salaries.
Photo clerks who developed Parks' first roll of film, had applauded his work and pointed him to Frank Murphy's women's clothing store in St. Paul, Minnesota for fashion assignments. Parks’ work caught the eye of Marva Louis, heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis' wife. He soon developed a portfolio.
Parks chose to work for the notable photographer Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration after he won a Julius Rosenwald fellowship in 1941 for his photographic work at Chicago's South Side Community Art Center. By the time he finally caught his big break at Vogue and Glamour magazines he had paid his dues. It was there he established his international reputation as a fashion photographer.
Fashion was only one of many subjects Parks could interpret. Life magazine recognized his talent in 1948 and for 22 years Parks' 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. His 1961 photo essay on a poor and dying Brazilian boy, Flavio da Silva, brought donations that saved the boy's life and paid for a new home for his family.
He covered fashions in women's garters, prison riots in New Jersey and gang wars in Harlem. His portraits include notables such as Winston Churchill, Grace Kelley, Alexander Calder, Louis Armstrong, Malcolm X, Ingrid Bergman, Duke Ellington, Paul Newman, Muhammad Ali, Barbra Streisand, and his literary contemporary Langston Hughes.
Parks is best remembered as the director of the 1971 film Shaft. Branching out from his photography in 1963, Parks went on to direct many films including The Learning Tree, based on his autobiographical novel. Parks composed music and even a ballet. Among his numerous books are: A Choice of Weapons (1966), To Smile in Autumn (1979), Voices in the Mirror (1990), Arias of Silence (1994), and a retrospective of his life and work titled Half Past Autumn (1997), which was made into an HBO special.
The youngest of 15 children, Parks was born into a black family in segregated Fort Scott, Kansas. His father, who provided for the family by subsistence farming, was extraordinary. Parks tells how his father, once, without provocation or permission, checked into the hospital to donate all of the skin from his back and back legs to a young burn victim. But it was his mother who died when he was only 15, who was the main influence on his life.
“I never wanted to diappoint her,” he once said.
A high school teacher told Parks and his classmates not to waste their family's money going to college because they “would only be porters and maids.” Parks never finished high school but by 1998, he had been awarded his 56th doctorate.
"I never allowed the fact that I experienced bigotry and discrimination to step in the way of doing what I have to do," he once said. "I don't understand why other people let that destroy them."
Parks was married and divorced three times. His wives were Sally Alvis, Elizabeth Campbell and Genevieve Young, a book editor whom he married in 1973 and divorced in 1979. For many years, Parks was romantically involved with Gloria Vanderbilt, a railroad heiress and clothing designer. Parks was a close friend of Muhammad Ali, and godfather to Malcolm X's daughter Quibilah Shabazz. He is a co-founder of Essence magazine, and wrote a ballet called Martin, in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr..
Gordon Parks and his influential work continue today to be an enduring force in society for the emotional and intellectual response they elicit, according to Melissa Tilley of AMSET.
In a 1998 interview with PBS, Reporter Phil Ponce asked how Parks could explain the fact that he’d had such a remarkable life.
"I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived," he said. “And now, I feel at 85…There's another horizon out there…But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.”
