Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks was an American photographer, filmmaker, composer, poet, novelist, and journalist whose work spanned much of the twentieth century.
Born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, he attended St. Paul Central High School, Storm King School, and Ricker College before building a career that crossed several creative disciplines. He worked as a photojournalist and fashion photographer as well as a more general journalist, bringing the same observational eye to editorial assignments that he applied to his personal projects. His range as a visual artist extended into film, where he served as both director and producer, and he also took on roles as a screenwriter and actor.
Among his directing credits, Parks helmed Shaft, Shaft's Big Score, and The Learning Tree, the last of which was semiautobiographical in nature. His accomplishments across photography, film, writing, poetry, and music brought him a number of formal recognitions over the course of his life. He received the Spingarn Medal, the National Medal of Arts, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was named a Library of Congress Living Legend. Those honors reflect the breadth of a career that moved between the visual arts, literary fiction, journalism, and cinema without settling into any single category.
Parks died on March 7, 2006, in New York City, at the age of ninety-three. His work as a director of narrative films, including the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree, alongside his sustained output as a photojournalist, novelist, poet, and composer, marks him as a figure whose creative practice was consistently multidisciplinary in character.
Quotes by Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks's insights on:
I’ve been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing.
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.
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.
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.
Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life – being a painter, a poet or a photographer.
I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil – along with the evil of racism – with a camera.
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.
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.
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.