In addition to his iconic photography of subjects as wide-ranging as Red Jackson -- the infamous Harlem gang leader -- to Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, Gordon Parks was a prolific author, filmmaker, and poet. Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1912 in a town he later described as "electrified with racial tension." He was the 15th child born into this dirt poor family. His mother died while he was young and he was sent to live
with his sister in Minnesota. He never went to college. Instead he was thrown out of his sister's house and never got to finish high school.
Homeless by sixteen, he worked as a busboy, a piano player and mopped floors, which help explain his empathy for Ella Watson, the woman in his famous photograph
American Gothic.
He lived in a rat-infested tenement in Harlem until he found work as a waiter on the railroad. Working on the railroad and getting a chance to see more of the U.S. fueled his interest in photography. He bought his first camera, a Voigtlander, from a pawn shop. He dropped one of his first rolls of film off at Eastman Kodak. Kodak liked his work very much and later gave him his first exhibition.
Parks also worked for a while as a fashion photographer and made a name for himself. His first real big break came in 1941 when he won a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a foundation dedicated to research about the south, with a special program designed to encourage the work of "promising blacks" in 1941. He used this fellowship to work in Washington, D.C. for Roy Stryker and the Farm Security Administration, like Lange before him.
Ironically, while working in Washington, D.C. Parks said, "I found out what prejudice was really like." He recalled the bigotry of that city as worse than any other place he had ever been. Stryker, who hired him, made him walk around the city to see how racist it was. It is from his treatment then that Parks decided to show the true Washington, D.C. to
the world. One evening, while Parks was having trouble figuring out how to accomplish this task, Stryker pointed out a charwoman at work and suggested Parks talk to her. Parks did so and thus began his relationship with Ella Watson. Parks' photograph of her produced his most famous picture,
American Gothic (
www.masters-of-photography.com/Parks).
American Gothic is a picture of Watson in the nation's capital with a large American flag behind her. She is holding a broom in one hand and a mop in the other. Watson looks both tired and angry. Because it is intentionally modeled after the famous painting by Grant Wood we know that it is a carefully posed shot. In a way it is Parks' response to Bourke-White's photo
Louisville Flood
as it forces the viewer to question why blacks aren't allowed to partake in the American dream. Here is a woman who mopped floors for the government all her life but can barely afford to sustain her existence.
I assume she posed for Parks in this way because he had taken the time to get to know her. Watson's life was a hard one. She had to struggle on her own after her mother died and her father was killed by a lynch mob. She married, became pregnant and then her husband was shot to death before her daughter was born. Watson's family included an adopted daughter, and her grandchildren, all living on just over a thousand dollars a year. Parks became deeply involved with her and family and took many more photographs of her and her family. It was the beginning of making close relationships with his subjects.
Parks was hired by
Life
in 1948, the first African-American to be honored with this distinction. His first assignment remains his most significant. He suggested
doing a profile of a famous gang leader in Harlem, Red Jackson. Repeating his experience of getting deeply with his subjects Parks stayed with the gangs for three months. His most famous photograph from this experience is of Red Jackson
(Half Past Autumn,
p. 81). It shows Jackson sitting in front of a dirty, shattered window in an abandoned building…watching. As the sunlight comes through the window it shows every detail of the boy's worried face. Red is smoking a cigarette, looking troubled, almost paranoid and because of the way the light hits him, there is only darkness behind him. As New Haven's gang violence continues to get worse with almost weekly shootings in primarily black neighborhoods, this photo, unfortunately, still resonates today.
In 1967
Life
sent Parks on an assignment to find out why black people were so discontent. He chose the Bessie and Norman Fontanelle family to speak for all poor blacks. He took heart-wrenching photographs of this family; their home, their family dinners, and their horrendous living conditions. My favorite photo is
Norman, Jr. reading in Bed, Half Past Autumn, p.233)
. Norman is lying on a bare mattress, with a blanket up to his waist trying to read in this dark, depressive space. The walls surrounding him are tenement walls with big splotches of cement fallen out making huge holes in the wall, as if they had been shot out. It reminds me of the poem
What happens to a Dream Deferred?
by Langston Hughes.
Parks wrote about their dire poverty and his words were published with the photos. So many readers were touched by their story that enough money was raised to buy them a house on Long Island. Unfortunately, a few months later, Norman Sr. came home drunk and fell asleep with a cigarette burning. The house was destroyed and Norman and a young son, Kenneth, were killed.
One photo from this time is,
Norman, Sr., burned from Scalding, is visited by Norman, Jr. at hospital (Half Past Autumn,
p.231
).
The father can barely sit up on his hospital bed. His face is scalded marring the entire right side of his face. His eyes are closed and he is bloody and devastated. Norman, Jr. with his head away from the camera looks down at the bed, an awkward and painful visit. Eventually the whole family fell apart; some were just lost, one died from an overdose and one got A.I.D.S. Norman Jr. went to prison and died too, but no one knew how. Certainly no one knew why.
The readers of
Life,
who helped this family, meant well. They were trying to change a cycle of poverty that has been going on since slavery. Although well intentioned, it takes more than a new house to change generations of self-hate and the racism that is still rampant today. No matter how well off, African-Americans know they are still not fully invited to partake in the American Dream.
Another strong image from Parks' time with
Life
is his portrait of Malcolm X, (
Half Past Autumn
, p. 241.) It is probably the one I saw when I was a kid. It is a picture of Malcolm X delivering a speech during a black Muslim rally in Chicago in 1963. He is raising his hand to get the crowd to listen, and to get them to take action. Malcolm is dressed in a suit, the image he wanted to portray to white America, and he seems very much in charge. Parks and Malcolm became friends and very much admired each other. Malcolm X said of Parks, "Success among whites never made Parks lose touch with black reality." This, of course was the highest compliment one black man could give another at that time. Now my students refer, sometimes, to successful black people as "acting white." How sad that they relate success with acting like white people.
Parks stayed with
Life
until 1972, almost 25 years. While there he photographed the black Muslims, the black Panthers and Martin Luther King's death among many other things. In this way Parks provided mainstream America, the readers of
Life Magazine
, an up close and personal view of the civil rights movement.
Parks published his first novel in 1963 and in 1968 became the first black man to produce and direct a film for a major Hollywood studio. 1n 1995 Parks donated his work to the Library of Congress because he wanted it "stored under one roof and a roof he could respect." A true Renaissance man, Parks died in March, 2006.