Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks (November 30, 1912 – March 7, 2006) was an American photographer, composer, author, poet, and filmmaker, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African Americans—and in glamour photography. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s (taken for a federal government project), for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score, and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.
Parks was one of the first black American filmmakers to direct films within the Hollywood system, developing films relating the experience of slaves and struggling black Americans, and helping create the "blaxploitation" genre. The National Film Registry cites The Learning Tree as "the first feature film by a black director to be financed by a major Hollywood studio."
Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of Andrew Jackson Parks and Sarah Ross, on November 30, 1912. He was the youngest of 15 children. His father was a farmer who grew corn, beets, turnips, potatoes, collard greens, and tomatoes. They also had a few ducks, chickens, and hogs.
He attended a segregated elementary school. Because the town was too small for segregated high schools, his high school was integrated. However, black students were not allowed to participate in sports or 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 his desire to go to college would be a waste of money.
When Parks was 11 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. 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 his 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 the age of 15. Struggling to survive, he worked in brothels, and as a singer, piano player, bus boy, traveling waiter, and semi-pro basketball player. In 1929, he briefly worked in an elite gentlemen's club, the Minnesota Club. There he observed the trappings of success and was able to read many 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.
At the age of twenty-eight, Parks was struck by photographs of migrant workers in a magazine. He bought his first camera, a Voigtländer Brillant, for $12.50 at a Seattle, Washington pawnshop and taught himself how to take photos. The photography clerks who developed his 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 specialized in photographs of society women. Parks's 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. The fellowship paid him $200 a month and offered him his choice of employer. This, in turn, contributed to being asked to join the Farm Security Administration (FSA) which was chronicling the nation's social conditions under the auspice of Roy Stryker.
Over the next few 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, D.C. Inspired and named after the iconic Grant Wood painting American Gothic, Parks' "haunting" photograph shows Ella Watson, a black woman who worked on the cleaning crew of the FSA building, standing stiffly in front of an American flag—a broom in one hand and a mop in the background. Parks was inspired to create the image after encountering racism repeatedly 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; 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's 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, D.C. as a correspondent with the Office of War Information 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 O.W.I. 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 centers. The most striking work by Parks during that period included: Dinner Time at Mr. Hercules Brown's Home, Somerville, Maine (1944); Grease Plant Worker, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1946); Car Loaded with Furniture on Highway (1945); Self Portrait (1945); and Ferry Commuters, Staten Island, N.Y. (1946).
Commercial and civic photography
Parks renewed his search for photography jobs in the fashion world. Following his resignation from the Office of War Information, 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."
His photographs for Life magazine, namely his 1956 photo essay, titled "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 the photo essay by Parks 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 "emphasized the prosaic details" of the lives of several families.