AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- American Gothic (1942) and two decades of Life photo essays on race, poverty and civil rights
- Worked in
- Black and white, and color (his 1956 Alabama series was shot on color slide film)
- Camera
- His first camera was a Voigtländer Brillant, bought in a pawnshop
- Also
- First African American staff photographer at Life; film director (The Learning Tree, Shaft), writer and composer
- Start with
- Segregation Story (Expanded Edition) (Steidl, 2022)
- Links
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was an American photographer, filmmaker and writer. He taught himself photography with a camera from a pawnshop, worked for the Farm Security Administration and became the first African American staff photographer at Life. In 1969 he became the first African American to write and direct a major Hollywood studio film, The Learning Tree.
The story
In January 1942, Gordon Parks arrived in Washington, D.C. He was 29 and had just started work as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. His new boss, Roy Stryker, gave him an unusual first task. Leave the camera. Go out and see the city. Buy a coat in a department store, have lunch, watch a movie.
It did not go well. The department store would not serve him. Restaurants turned him away, and he was removed from theaters. When he came back, Stryker asked how it went. “I think you know how it went,” Parks said. Years later he wrote that in this “radiant, historic place,” “racism was rampant.”
He had come a long way to get there. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, as the youngest of 15 children, he moved to Minnesota at 16 after his mother died. He worked as a janitor, a musician and a waiter on trains. A picture magazine made him want to photograph, so he bought a camera in a pawnshop and taught himself. A fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund then brought him to the FSA.
Stryker had advice. He told him to start closer to home and talk to older Black people who had lived with this kind of treatment. In the FSA building, Parks met Ella Watson, who cleaned the offices. She told him about her life. Her husband had been shot and killed two days before their second daughter was born. Now she was raising two grandchildren. Parks asked if she would pose. “In this outfit?” she asked. He placed her in front of the American flag, with a broom and a mop, like Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic.
Stryker saw the picture. “You’ve got the right idea, but you’re going to get us all fired!” he said. He filed it away. Still, Parks kept going. For four months Watson let him into her home, her church and her neighborhood. The picture Stryker filed away later became one of his most famous.
He had walked through Washington that first week without a camera. He came back knowing what he wanted to do with one. “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,” he said in 1999.
The work
- 1912Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of 15 children
- 1928Moves to St. Paul, Minnesota, after his mother’s death
- 1938Buys his first camera in a Seattle pawnshop
- 1942Joins the FSA in Washington and makes American Gothic
- 1948Joins Life as its first African American staff photographer
- 1956Photographs segregation in Alabama in color for Life
- 1969Writes and directs The Learning Tree
- 1988Receives the National Medal of Arts
- 2006Dies at home in New York, aged 93
Lessons
Start close to home. His first great picture was of a woman who cleaned the offices in his own building.
Stay longer. After American Gothic he spent four months photographing Ella Watson’s home, family and church.
Turn anger into work. Racism in Washington hurt him. Stryker’s advice helped him answer it with pictures.
Try this: find someone whose work keeps your street or building running. Ask about their life before you lift the camera. Then make one portrait that shows what they told you.
Gear
Parks did not write much about his equipment. Only his first camera is well documented.
Twin-lens reflex camera: his first camera was a Voigtländer Brillant, bought in a pawnshop in Seattle. Within months his pictures were in the window of an Eastman Kodak store in Minneapolis.
Color slide film: in 1956 he photographed segregation in Alabama for Life in color, on slide film.
Books
Segregation Story (Expanded Edition) (Steidl and The Gordon Parks Foundation, 2022). A 208-page clothbound book with 120 color photographs, edited by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. and Michal Raz-Russo. In the summer of 1956, Life sent Parks to Alabama to photograph the daily life of an extended Black family under Jim Crow laws. Only 26 pictures ran in the magazine. More than 70 lost color transparencies were found years later. This edition adds unpublished pictures and a new essay by the photographer Dawoud Bey, next to texts by Maurice Berger and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. The best place to see his color work.
A Choice of Weapons (first published 1966; Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010). His autobiography, 296 pages, with a foreword by the Minneapolis photographer Wing Young Huie in the new edition. It begins in 1928, when he came to St. Paul at 16 after his mother’s death, homeless and hungry. It follows him through jobs as a janitor, porter and musician, his first secondhand camera, the South Side of Chicago, the FSA in Washington and the war years. For anyone who wants to know how a self-taught photographer found his way.
Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective (Bulfinch Press with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1997). Made with the curator Philip Brookman for the big retrospective at the Corcoran in Washington, which then toured nine more museums until 2001. It covers his whole life in pictures, with much of his work for Life, and his own writing. A good one-volume overview of a very long career.
The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 (Steidl, The Gordon Parks Foundation and The Museum of Modern Art, 2020). In 1957 Life sent Parks on a six-week trip through New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles for an eight-page color essay on crime. This 120-page book, edited by Sarah Hermanson Meister, shows 90 pictures, many never published before. Texts are by Nicole Fleetwood and Bryan Stevenson. It shows police work and prisons with empathy, far from the stereotypes of the time.
Explore the captivating tale of Gordon Parks' "American Gothic," an image that defied conventions and challenged societal norms, embodying the spirit of resilience in the face of adversity.