65 Quotes by Gordon Parks

You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery. You can show things that you like about the universe, things that you hate about the universe. It’s capable of doing both.

I’ve been asked if I think there will ever come a time when all people come together. I would like to think there will. All we can do is hope and dream and work toward that end. And that’s what I’ve tried to do all my life.

At first I wasn’t sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.

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.

I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil – along with the evil of racism – with a camera.

Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life – being a painter, a poet or a photographer.

I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn’t normally do for a young photographer just starting out.

The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can’t walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they’re really – the important people are the people he photographs.

So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, ’41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.