Gordon Parks

Parks was the youngest of 15 children on a farm outside Fort Scott, Kansas, where Black students were kept off the sports teams and a teacher told him college would waste his money. His mother died when he was 14, and he spent his last night at home sleeping beside her coffin. Sent to St. Paul to live with a sister, he clashed with her husband and was put out on the street at 15. He got by as a brothel piano player, a busboy and a semi-pro basketball player before, at 28 and broke, a magazine spread of migrant workers stopped him cold — he bought a camera at a Seattle pawnshop for 12 dollars and 50 cents.

He taught himself the camera and within two years had a Rosenwald Fellowship, one of the first of its kind given to a Black photographer, and a place inside the Farm Security Administration under Roy Stryker. His 1942 portrait of Ella Watson, a Black government cleaner, posed before an American flag with a broom and mop, became known as American Gothic and, Stryker warned him, could get his photographers fired. Life magazine hired him in 1948 after a photo essay on a Harlem gang leader, and he stayed 24 years, covering fashion, poverty, Malcolm X and segregation with the same eye. In 1969 he wrote, scored and directed The Learning Tree, becoming the first Black director financed by a major studio, and in 1971 he directed Shaft, which helped launch an entire genre of American film.

Parks built a career on empathy and then, at his most commercially successful, made a movie that ran on style over subject. Shaft turned a private detective into a swaggering pop icon and made money, but critics inside the Black press accused it, and the blaxploitation genre it helped launch, of trading the dignity Parks had spent 20 years documenting for a fantasy of guns and cool. Parks defended the film as entertainment rather than politics, a distinction his earlier work at Life had never needed to draw. His personal life ran through three marriages and as many divorces, and in 1979 his eldest son, Gordon Parks Jr., who had built his own directing career partly in his father's shadow, died in a plane crash in Kenya at 44.

Parks kept working past 90, writing memoirs, composing a ballet for Martin Luther King Jr. and photographing almost until his death in Manhattan on March 7, 2006, at 93. The honors piled up before and after: the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1972, a Library of Congress Living Legend citation in 2000, more than 20 honorary degrees. His photographs kept resurfacing in other people's work long after — Spike Lee cited him as proof a Black director could get films made at all, and in 2016 Kendrick Lamar turned Parks's still images into moving vignettes for the music video ELEMENT, introducing his Depression-era Kansas photographs to an audience two generations removed from them.

Gordon Parks's life against the full span of the corpus.

• American Gothic, Washington, D.C. artwork
  Portrait of government cleaner Ella Watson before the flag 1942
• A Choice of Weapons book
  His first autobiography 1966
• The Learning Tree film
  Wrote, scored and directed it himself, filmed in Fort Scott 1969
• Shaft film
  Helped launch the blaxploitation genre 1971
• Essence magazine company
  Co-founded and served as founding editorial director 1970

• November 30, 1912 aged 0 Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of 15 children
• 1926 aged ~14 His mother dies and he is later put out on his own at 15
• 1940 aged ~28 Buys his first camera at a Seattle pawnshop, at 28
• 1942 aged ~30 Photographs American Gothic, Washington, D.C. for the Farm Security Administration
• 1948 aged ~36 Joins Life magazine, where he stays 24 years
• 1969 aged ~57 Directs The Learning Tree for Warner Bros. The first feature film by a Black director financed by a major studio.
• 1971 aged ~59 Directs Shaft
• March 7, 2006 aged 93 Dies in Manhattan at 93

• Malcolm X 1925–1965
  Civil-rights leader whose critique of racism and advocacy of Black dignity reshaped American political thought. named him godfather to his daughter
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. composed a ballet tribute to
• Muhammad Ali 1942–2016
  Boxing legend and cultural icon known for his athletic brilliance and principled stance against the Vietnam War draft. photographed extensively
• Kendrick Lamar b. 1987
  Rapper whose albums won a Pulitzer Prize and multiple Grammy Awards. his photographs animated in ELEMENT