Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, Park’s fam-
ily and farm background provided him with a work
ethic and self-esteem that would be crucial in fac-
ing the economic and racist challenges in his life. At
16, following his mother’s death, he traveled to stay
with a sister and her husband in Minnesota, but it
was an uneasy relationship, forcing Parks to leave
and survive on his own by working various jobs.
By the mid-1930s, while working as a waiter on a
train, he was inspired by the beauty of magazine
photographs he found in discarded periodicals.
He taught himself to use a camera and began to
photograph the many people he observed. Bluffing
his way into a job as a fashion photographer, Parks
began to make a name for himself in Chicago, and
he won a position with the Farm Security Admin-
istration in 1942 to photograph working-class
people. The first black photographer for Glamour
and Vogue magazines, he earned a staff position at
Life magazine in 1948. His first assignment was to
cover gang confrontations in Harlem, and over the
next two decades Parks’s photographs won him ac-
colades and brought him in contact with numer-
ous celebrities and politicians.
His visual talent translated effectively to mo-
tion pictures, and in 1968 Parks completed The
Learning Tree, the first Hollywood feature film by
a black director. On that film, based on his novel
of the same title, Parks also served as screenwriter,
music composer, and producer. His next film, Shaft
(1971), introduced one of the black male cinematic
icons of the decade, ushering in the attitudes, lan-
guage, sexuality, and styles of the superheroes of
the black urban action genre. Parks followed with
a number of additional films, including Shaft’s Big
Score (1972), The Super Cops (1974), Leadbelly
(1976), and, for television’s American Playhouse
series, Solomon Northup’s Odyssey (1985).
As he made history in still photography and
motion pictures, Parks also nurtured his writing
talents. He gained perhaps his largest readership
with his three autobiographical books. The first, A
Choice of Weapons (1966), recounts his struggles at
age 16 to be self-sufficient and to survive on his
own, while presenting his early love for photogra-
phy. To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir (1979) covers
his life from the early 1940s to the late 1970s, as-
sessing his professional success and aspects of being
a black celebrity in arenas dominated by whites.
The third volume, Voices in the Mirror: An Auto-
biography (1990), touches on his earlier years but
provided a more detailed look at his marriages and
children, as well as his experiences during the civil
rights era, the BLACK POWER movement, the Holly-
wood studio years, and travels abroad. Toward the
end of the book, Parks reflects, “I have learned a
few things along the way. The lesson I value most is
to take human beings as they are, to take the mea-
sure of them; to accept or reject them, regardless of
wealth, impoverishment or color” (327).
Parks also went on to complete other nonfic-
tion works, in which he combined essays and pho-
tographs to tell his thoughts. Born Black (1971)
contains essays on black civil rights fighters and
highlights a struggling black family in Harlem.
Flavio (1978) tells the story of a young Brazilian
boy named Flavio da Silva, whom Parks met and
befriended while photographing the slums of Rio
de Janeiro for Life magazine. At the same time, in
three volumes, Parks complemented his poetry
with photographs to explore a range of themes
and topics: Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Cam-
era (1968), In Love (1971), and Moments without
Proper Names (1975).
Of his fiction, two novels were published: The
Learning Tree (1963) and Shannon (1981). The first
novel, inspired by the author’s younger years in
Kansas, has been the better known of the two and
served as the foundation for the 1968 film bear-
ing the same title. The novel follows the coming
of age of the black protagonist, Newt Winger, who
finds that happiness and tragedy are inextricably
connected in his racially divided town. At a pivotal
point in the novel, Newt has to choose between his
integrity and racial allegiance when he confesses
to witnessing a black man murder a white farmer,
thereby freeing the accused white man with his
testimony. Shannon, set in New York City, from
World War I to the Great Depression, explores the
complexity of American life across racial and class
backgrounds and boundaries.
Gordon Parks not only worked in numerous
fields but was outstanding in all of them. Over
his lifetime, he has been awarded 24 honorary406 Parks, Gordon