Gordon Parks

2006

Fort Scott, Kansas

American

Parks received more than 20 honorary doctorates in his lifetime
1941: Awarded a fellowship for photography from the Rosenwald Fund. The fellowship allowed him to work with the Farm Security Administration
1961: Named “Magazine Photographer of the Year” (1960) by the American Society of Magazine Photographers.
1970: Kansas State University awarded Parks the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters
1972: The NAACP awarded Parks the Spingarn Medal .
1974: Kansas State University hosted a week-long “Gordon Parks Festival” from 4 – 11 November
1976: Honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Thiel College, Greenville, Pennsylvania
1989: The United States Library of Congress selected The Learning Tree as one of the first 25 films chosen for permanent preservation as part of the National Film Registry, calling it culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant due to being the first major studio feature film directed by an African American
1990: Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, Missouri School of Journalism, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
1998: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement http://www.anisfieldwolf.org/books/lifetime-gordon-parks/
1999: Gordon Parks Elementary School, a nonprofit, K-5 grade public charter school in Kansas City, Missouri, was established to educate the urban core inhabitants
2000: The Congress of Racial Equality Lifetime Achievement Award
2000: Library of Congress selected Parks’s film Shaft for National Film Registry preservation calling it culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant
2000 (April): Library of Congress awards Parks its accolade Living Legend, honouring artists, writers, activists, filmmakers, physicians, entertainers, sports figures and public servants who have made significant contributions to America’s diverse cultural, scientific and social heritage, one of 26 writers and artists so honoured
2001: Kitty Carlisle Hart Award, Arts & Business Council, New York
2003: Royal Photographic Society’s Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (Hon FRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography
2002: Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award
2002: Inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum
2004: The Art Institute of Boston awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters
2008: An alternative learning center in Saint Paul, Minnesota renamed their school Gordon Parks High School after receiving a new building.
2021: The Gordon Parks Award for Black Excellence in Filmmaking, Tallgrass Film Festival, Wichita, Kansas, instituted in Parks’ honour

Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of a farmer, Andrew Jackson Parks and Sarah Rosson 30 November 1912, the youngest of 15 children. He attended a segregated elementary school. His high school had both Black people and white people, because the town was too small for segregated high schools, but Black students were not allowed to play sports or attend school social activities, and they were discouraged from developing aspirations for higher education. Parks related in a documentary on his life that his teacher told him that his desire to go to college would be a waste of money.
When Parks was eleven years old, three white boys threw him into the Marmaton River, believing he couldn’t swim. He had the presence of mind to duck underwater so they wouldn’t see him make it to land. His mother died when he was fourteen and he spent his last night at the family home sleeping beside his mother’s coffin, seeking not only solace but a way to face his own fear of death.
Soon after, he was sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with a sister and her husband. He and his brother-in-law argued frequently and Parks was finally turned out onto the street to fend for himself at age 15. Struggling to survive, he worked as a singer, piano player, bus boy, traveling waiter, and semi-pro basketball player. In 1929, he briefly worked in the Minnesota Club for gentlemen, where he observed the trappings of success and was able to read books from the club library. When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought an end to the club, he jumped a train to Chicago, where he managed to land a job in a flophouse.

Photography

At the age of eight Parks was struck by photographs of migrant workers in a magazine. In the late 1930s he bought his first camera, a Voigtländer Brillant for $12.50 at a pawnshop and taught himself how to take photos. The photography clerks who developed Parks’ first roll of film applauded his work and prompted him to seek a fashion assignment at a women’s clothing store in St. Paul, Minnesota, owned by Frank Murphy. Those photographs caught the eye of Marva Louis, wife of heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis. She encouraged Parks and his wife, Sally Alvis, to move to Chicago in 1940, where he began a portrait business and specialised in photographs of society women. Parks’ photographic work in Chicago, especially in capturing the myriad experiences of African Americans across the city, led him to receive the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942, paying him $200 a month and offering him his choice of employer. This led to Parks being asked to join the Farm Security Administration(FSA), which was chronicling the nation’s social conditions, under the auspice of Roy Stryker.

Government photography

In the following years Parks moved from job to job, developing a freelance portrait and fashion photographer sideline. He began to chronicle the city’s South Side Black ghetto and in 1941 an exhibition of those photographs won Parks a photography fellowship with the FSA.
Working at the FSA as a trainee under Roy Stryker, Parks created one of his best known photographs, American Gothic, Washington, DC named after the Grant
Wood painting, American Gothic. This legendary painting depicts a traditionally stoic white American farmer and daughter, and it bore a striking though ironic resemblance to Parks’ photograph of a Black menial labourer. Parks shows a Black woman, Ella Watson, who worked on the cleaning crew of the FSA building, as she stands stiffly in front of an American flag, a broom in one hand and a mop in the background. Parks had been inspired to create the image after repeatedly encountering racism in restaurants and shops in the segregated capital city.

Upon viewing the photograph Stryker said that it was an indictment of America, and that it could get all of his photographers fired. He urged Parks to keep working with Watson, which led to a series of photographs of her daily life. Parks said later that his first image was overdone and not subtle but other commentators have argued that it drew strength from its polemical nature and its duality of victim and survivor, and thus affected far more people than his subsequent pictures of Mrs Watson.

Parks’ overall body of work for the federal government—using his camera “as a weapon”—would draw far more attention from contemporaries and historians than that of all other Black photographers in federal service at the time. Today most historians reviewing federally commissioned Black photographers of that era focus almost exclusively on Parks.

After the FSA disbanded, Parks remained in Washington DC as a correspondent with the Office of War Information (OWI), where he photographed the all Black 332d Fighter Group, known as the Tuskegee Airmen. He was unable to follow the group in the overseas war theatre, so he resigned from the OWI. He would later follow Stryker to the Standard Oil Photography Project in New Jersey, which assigned photographers to take pictures of small towns and industrial centres.

Parks renewed his search for photography jobs in the fashion world. Following his resignation from the OWI , Parks moved to Harlem and became a freelance fashion photographer for Vogue under the editorship of Alexander Liberman. Despite racist attitudes of the day, Vogue editor Liberman hired him to shoot a collection of evening gowns. As Parks photographed fashion for Vogue over the next few years, he developed the distinctive style of photographing his models in motion rather than in static poses. During this time, he published his first two books, Flash Photography (1947) and Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948).
A 1948 photographic essay on a young Harlem gang leader won Parks a staff job as a photographer and writer with America’s leading photo magazine, Life. His involvement with Life would last until 1972. For over 20 years, Parks produced photographs on subjects including fashion, sports, Broadway, poverty, and racial segregation, as well as portraits of Malcolm X
Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, and Barbra Streisand. He became one of the most provocative and celebrated photojournalists in the United States.
particularly His 1956 photo essay for Life magazine, The Restraints: Open and Hidden, illuminated the effects of racial segregation while simultaneously following the everyday lives and activities of three families in and near Mobile, Alabama: the Thorntons, Causeys, and Tanners. As curators at the High Museum of Art Atlanta note, while Parks’ photo essay served as decisive documentation of the Jim Crow South and all of its effects, he did not simply focus on demonstrations, boycotts, and brutality that were associated with that period; instead, he emphasised the prosaic details of the lives of several families.
An exhibition of photographs from a 1950 project Parks completed for Life was shown in 2015 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Parks returned to his hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas, where segregation persisted, and he documented conditions in the community and the contemporary lives of many of his eleven classmates from the segregated middle school they attended. The project included his commentary, but the work was never published by Life.
During his years with Life, Parks also wrote books on the subject of photography (particularly documentary photography), and in 1960 was named Photographer of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Photographers.

Film
In the 1950s Parks worked as a consultant on various Hollywood productions. He later directed a series of documentaries on Black ghetto life that were commissioned by National Educational Television. With his film adaptation of his semi-autobiographical novel The Learning Tree in 1969 for Warner Bros Seven Arts, Parks became Hollywood’s first major Black director. It was filmed in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. Parks also wrote the screenplay and composed the musical score for the film, with assistance from his friend, the composer Henry Brant.
Shaft, a 1971 detective film directed by Parks and starring Richard Roundtree as John Shaft, became a major hit that spawned a series of films that would be labeled as blaxploitation. The blaxploitation genre was one in which images of lower class Blacks being involved with drugs, violence and women,were exploited for commercially successful films featuring Black actors, and was popular with parts of the Black community. Parks’ feel for settings was confirmed by Shaft, with its portrayal of the supercool leather clad Black private detective hired to find the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem racketeer.
Parks also directed the 1972 sequel Shaft’s Big Score, in which the protagonist finds himself caught in the middle of rival gangs of racketeers. Parks’ other directorial credits include The Super Cops (1974) and Leadbelly (1976), a biographical film of the blues musician Huddie Ledbetter. In the 1980s he made several films for television and composed the music and a libretto for Martin, a ballet tribute to Martin Luther King which premiered in Washington DC during 1989. It was screened on national television on King’s birthday in 1990.
In 2000 he had a cameo appearance in the Shaft sequel that starred Samuel L Jackson in the title role as the namesake and nephew of the original John Shaft. In the cameo scene, Parks was sitting playing chess when Jackson greeted him as Mr P.

The Gordon Parks Foundation
The Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, New York states that it permanently preserves the work of Gordon Parks, makes it available to the public through exhibitions, books, and electronic media, The organisation also says it supports artistic and educational activities that advance what Gordon described as ‘the common search for a better life and a better world.’ That support includes scholarships for artistic students, and assistance to researchers. Their headquarters includes an exhibition space with rotating photography exhibits, open free to the public, with guided group tours available by arrangement.
The foundation also admits qualified researchers to their archive, by appointment. The foundation collaborates with other organizations and institutions, nationally and internationally, to advance its aims.

The Gordon Parks Museum
The Gordon Parks Museum Centre in Fort Scott, Kansas reports that it holds dozens of Parks’ donated photos, and various belongings bequeathed by him to the Museum The collection includes awards and medals, personal photos, paintings and drawings of Gordon, plaques, certificates, diplomas and honorary doctorates, selected books and articles, clothing, record player, tennis racquet, magazine articles and his collection of Life magazines. The museum has also received several of Parks’ cameras and his writing desk.

Library of Congress, Washington DC
The Library of Congress (LOC) reports that in 1995 it acquired Parks’ personal collection, including papers, music, photographs, films, recordings, drawings and other products of his … career.
The LOC was already home to a federal archive that included Parks first major photojournalism projects, the images he produced for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) (1942–43), and for the Office of War Information (OWI) (1943–45).
In April 2000 the LOC awarded Parks its accolade Living Legend, one of only 26 writers and artists so honoured by the LOC. The LOC also holds Parks’ published and unpublished scores, and several of his films and television productions.

National Film Registry
Parks’ autobiographical motion picture, The Learning Tree, and his African American, antihero action drama Shaft, have both been selected to be permanently preserved as part of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The Learning Tree was one of the original group of 25 films first selected by the LOC for the National Film Registry.

National Archives, Washington, D.C.
The National Archives also hold the film My Father, Gordon Parks (1969: archive 306.8063), a film about Parks and his production of his autobiographical motion picture, The Learning Tree, along with a print (from the original) of Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, a film made by Parks for a Public Broadcasting System telecast about the ordeal of a slave. The Archives also hold various photos from Parks’ years in government service.

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
The Smithsonian Institution has an extensive list of holdings related to Gordon Parks, particularly photos.

Wichita State University
In 1991, Wichita State University (WSU), in Wichita, the largest city in Parks’ home state of Kansas, awarded Parks its highest honour for achievement: the President’s Medal. Parks then entrusted WSU with a collection of 150 of his famous photos, but WSU returned them, which deeply upset Parks. There were various reasons for this return, including confusion as to whether they were a gift or loan, and whether the university could adequately protect and preserve them. It was unfortunate however that a further snub came from Wichita’s city officials, who also declined the opportunity to acquire many of Parks’ papers and photos.
By 2000 WSU and Parks had clarified matters and the university resumed honouring Parks and accumulating his work. In 2008 the Gordon Parks Foundation selected WSU as repository for 140 boxes of Parks’ photos, manuscripts, letters and other papers. In 2014, another 125 of Parks’ photos were acquired from the Foundation by WSU, with help from Wichita philanthropists Paula and Barry Downing, for display at the university’s Ulrich Museum of Art.

Kansas State University
The Gordon Parks Collection in the Richard LD and Marjorie J Morse Department Special
Collections at Kansas State University primarily documents the creation of his film The Learning
Tree. The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University holds a collection of 204 Gordon Parks photographs as well as artist files and artwork documentation. This collection is made up of 128 photographs that were chosen and gifted by Gordon Parks in 1973 to K-State, after receiving an honorary doctor of letters degree from the university in 1970. The gift included black and white images printed from negatives made between 1949 and 1970 and stored in the Life magazine archives. The donation also included colour photographs printed from negatives in the artist’s private collection. The K-State gift is the first known set of photographs specifically selected by Parks for a public institution. The collection also includes a group of 73 photographs printed after two residences by Gordon Parks in Manhattan, Kansas. Parks first returned for a residency in 1984, sponsored by the local newspaper The Manhattan Mercury for its centennial; he returned for another in 1985, initiated by the Manhattan Arts Council and sponsored by the city and various community organizations and individuals. Seventy three photographs printed after these visits were transferred from the Manhattan Arts Center to K-State in 2017. The photographs are of locations in and around Manhattan, including churches and historic homes and K-State architecture and students.

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/_QXxWEH0ykiDIA?hl=en

https://www.nga.gov/learn/teachers/lessons-activities/uncovering-america/parks-photography.html

https://www.biography.com/artist/gordon-parks

https://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/gordon-parks/photography-archive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks#cite_note-14

https://www.azquotes.com/author/11337-Gordon_Parks