Gordon Parks (1912-2006)--the groundbreaking photographer, writer, composer, activist, and filmmaker--
was only sixteen in 1928 when he moved from Kansas to St. Paul, Minnesota, after his mother's death. There, homeless and hungry, he began his fight to survive, to educate himself, and to fulfill his potential dream. This compelling autobiography, first published in 1966, now back in print by popular demand and with a new foreword by Wing Young Huie, tells how Parks managed to escape the poverty and bigotry around him and to launch his distinguished career by choosing the weapons given him by a mother who placed love, dignity, and hard work over hatred. Parks, the first African American to work at Life magazine and the first to write, direct, and score a Hollywood film, told an interviewer in 1999, I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera.

A perceptive narrative of one man's struggle to realize the values (defined as democratic and
especially American) he has been taught to respect. --New York Times Book Review

A lean, well-written memoir. --Time

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was a groundbreaking photographer, writer, composer, activist, and film director. He may be best known for his photo essays for Life magazine and as the director of the 1971 film Shaft. Wing Young Huie is an acclaimed photographer and the author of several books including Frogtown and Looking for Asian America.

An expanded edition of Parks' classic account of race relations in America, with previously unpublished images and texts

This expanded edition of Gordon Parks: Segregation Story includes around 30 previously unpublished photographs, as well as enhanced reproductions created from Parks' original color transparencies; newly discovered descriptions Parks wrote for the photographs; a manuscript of film-developing instructions and captions Parks authored with Samuel F. Yette; previously published texts by the late art historian Maurice Berger and the esteemed journalist and civil rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault; and a new essay by artist Dawoud Bey.
After the photographs were first presented in a 1956 issue of Life magazine, the bulk of Parks' assignment was thought to be lost. In 2011, five years after Parks' death, the Gordon Parks Foundation found more than 200 color transparencies belonging to the series. In 2014 the series was first published as a book, and since then new photographs have been uncovered.
In the summer of 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to Alabama to document the daily realities of African Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the rural South. The resulting color photographs are among Parks' most powerful images, and, in the decades since, have become emblematic representations of race relations in America. Pursued at grave danger to the photographer himself, the project was an important chapter in Parks' career-long endeavor to use the camera as a weapon for social change.
Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant laborer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. He evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. The first African American director to helm a major motion picture, he helped launch the blaxploitation genre with his film Shaft (1971). Parks died in 2006.

Parks' impactful images from the forefront of the civil rights and Black Power movements

Originally published in 1971, Gordon Parks' Born Black was the first book to unite his writing and his photography and also the first to provide a focused survey of Parks' documentation of a crucial time for the civil rights and Black Power movements.
More than 50 years later, this expanded edition illuminates Parks' vision for the book and offers deeper insight into the series contained within. The original publication featured nine articles commissioned by Life magazine from 1963 to 1970 supplemented with later commentary by Parks and presented as his personal account of these important historical moments. Born Black includes the original text and images, as well as additional photographs from each series, spreads from the 1971 book, early correspondence and reproductions of related Life articles.
The nine series included in Born Black include a rare glimpse inside San Quentin State Prison; extensive documentation of the Black Muslim movement and the Black Panthers; his commentaries on the deaths of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; intimate portrait studies of Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver; and a narrative of the daily life of the impoverished Fontenelle family in Harlem. These selections have come to define Parks' legendary career as a photographer and activist. This reimagined, comprehensive edition of Born Black highlights the lasting legacy of these projects and their importance to our understanding of critical years in American history.

A fine novel.
THE BOSTON HERALD
Photographer, writer, and composer, Gordon Parks has written a moving, true-to-life novel of growing up as a black man in this country in this century. Hailed by critics and readers alike, THE LEARNING TREE tells the extraordinary journey of a family as they struggle to understand the world around them and leave their mark a world that is better for their having been in it.

A nuanced profile, in image and text, of the great Black Power leader at the exhilarating moment of the movement's ascendancy

Gordon Parks' 1967 Life magazine essay Whip of Black Power is a nuanced profile of the young, controversial civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael gained national attention and inspired media backlash when he issued the call for Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966. Parks shadowed him from the fall of 1966 to the spring of 1967, as Carmichael gave speeches, headed meetings and promoted the growing Black Power movement. Parks' photos and writing addressed Carmichael's intelligence and humor, presenting the whole man behind the headline-making speeches and revealing his own advocacy of Black Power and its message of self-determination and love.
Stokely Carmichael and Black Power delves into Parks' groundbreaking presentation of Carmichael, with analysis of his images and accompanying text about the charismatic leader. Lisa Volpe explores Parks' complex understanding of the movement and its leader, and Cedric Johnson frames Black Power within the heightened political moment of the late 1960s. Carmichael's own voice is represented through a reprint of his important 1966 essay What We Want.
Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was a photographer, filmmaker, musician and author whose 50-year career focused on American culture, social justice, the civil rights movement and the Black American experience. Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was awarded the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942, which led to a position with the Farm Security Administration. In 1969 he became the first Black American to write and direct a major feature film, The Learning Tree, and his next directorial endeavor, Shaft (1971), helped define a film genre.

An expansive look at one of the greatest American photo series

Gordon Parks' 1942 portrait of government worker Ella Watson, American Gothic, is among the most celebrated photographs of the 20th century. The photograph not only connects the intimacy of one person's life with a national state of affairs but also engages with a larger history of American images by referring to and reinterpreting Grant Wood's celebrated 1930 painting of the same name. Created as part of an extensive collaboration between the photographer and his subject, it is at once a record of one woman's position within the racial, professional and economic hierarchies that stratified the nation's capital and Parks' visual reckoning with the realities of living in racially segregated Washington, D.C.
Through his work with Watson--a custodian in the government building where he worked--Parks composed an intimate portrait of Black life by focusing on everyday activities, from work routines to family meals and church services. The resulting photographs trace a remarkably intimate portrait of Watson as a multidimensional figure, cherished by her community and vitally important within the civic sphere. American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson provides a comprehensive overview of this pivotal series of photographs, including more than 50 images--some never before published--and additional archival material.
Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was an acclaimed American photographer and film director prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism, particularly in issues of civil rights and poverty. His many photographic series include his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s (taken for the Farm Security Administration Program) and his photographic essays for Life magazine. He directed the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.

Parks' chronicle of small-town Maine anticipates his profound images of civil rights and inequality

In January 1944, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) photographed Herklas Brown--the owner of a general store and Esso gas station in Somerville, Maine. Parks traveled to the state under the auspices of the Standard Oil Company New Jersey (SONJ) to record their contributions to the war effort and document the home front in this crucial period. His photographs chronicled oil and gas facilities and workers, small-town Esso gas station owners, as well as people whose lives depended on fuel and other SONJ products.
Consistent with his work before and after, Parks prioritized getting to know his subjects as people, photographing Brown not only at his Esso station but also at home with his family. Despite the challenges he faced as a Black man traveling alone, Parks created a compelling documentary record of rural America. The images from this period offer crucial insight into the historic moment, as well as Parks' early photographic practice directly before he began his tenure at Life magazine. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Herklas Brown and Maine, 1944 features more than 90 previously unpublished photographs.

Class, race and labor in a Pittsburgh plant: a rarely seen series by Gordon Parks

By 1944, Gordon Parks had established himself as a photographer who freely navigated the fields of press and commercial photography, with an unparalleled humanist perspective. That year, Roy Stryker--the former Farm Security Administration official who was now heading the public relations department for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)--commissioned Parks to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to document the Penola, Inc. Grease Plant.
Employing his signature style, Parks spent two years chronicling the plant's industry--critical to Pittsburgh's history and character--by photographing its workers. The resulting photographs, dramatically staged and lit and striking in their composition, showed the range of activities engaged in by Black and white workers, divided as they were by roles, race and class. The images were used as marketing materials and made available to local and national newspapers, as well as corporate magazines and newsletters. However, they served as much more than documentation of industry, enduring as an exploration of labor and its social and economic ramifications in World War II America by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Featuring more than 100 photographs, many previously unpublished, this is the first book to focus exclusively on Parks' photographs for the Standard Oil Company, illuminating an important chapter in his career prior to his landmark career as a staff photographer for Life.
Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. He worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. In addition to his tenures photographing for the FSA (1941-45) and Life magazine (1948-72), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. He died in 2006.

Acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, composer, novelist, and memoirist, Gordon Parks has participated in, been witness to, and documented many of the major events in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries.

In A Hungry Heart, Parks reflects on the people and events that shaped him: from growing up poor on the Kansas prairie to crisscrossing the country on the North Coast Limited; documenting poverty and injustice in Chicago to doing fashion spreads for Vogue; photographing black revolutionaries to writing, composing the soundtrack for, and directing the Hollywood movie version of his novel The Learning Tree. More than a self-portrait of the artist, A Hungry Heart is a striking account of an American era.

A Harlem Family 1967 honors the legacy and the work of late iconic artist and photojournalist Gordon Parks, who would have turned 100 on November 30, 2012. The exhibition catalogue is co-published by The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Gordon Parks Foundation and features approximately 80 black-and-white photographs of the Fontenelle family, whose lives Gordon Parks documented as part of a 1968 Life magazine photo essay. A searing portrait of poverty in the United States, the Fontenelle photographs provide a view of Harlem through the narrative of a specific family at a particular moment in time.

The emergence of a social conscience in rarely seen images from Parks' formative years

Focusing on new research and access to forgotten pictures, The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950 documents the importance of these years in shaping Gordon Parks' passionate vision. The book brings together photographs and publications made during the first and most formative decade of his 65-year career.

During the 1940s Parks' photographic ambitions grew to express a profound understanding of his cultural and political experiences. From the first photographs he published in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and his relationship to the Chicago Black Renaissance, to his mentorship with Roy Stryker and his breakthrough work for America's influential picture magazines--including Ebony and Life--this book traces Parks' rapid evolution from an accomplished, self-taught practitioner to a groundbreaking artistic and journalistic voice.

Gordon Parks' ethically complex depictions of crime in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with previously unseen photographs

A New York Times Book Review 2020 holiday gift guide pick

When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade, the first African American to hold this position. Parks embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in color. The resulting eight-page photo-essay The Atmosphere of Crime was noteworthy not only for its bold aesthetic sophistication, but also for how it challenged stereotypes about criminality then pervasive in the mainstream media. They provided a richly hued, cinematic portrayal of a largely hidden world: that of violence, police work and incarceration, seen with empathy and candor.

Parks rejected clichés of delinquency, drug use and corruption, opting for a more nuanced view that reflected the social and economic factors tied to criminal behavior and afforded a rare window into the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it. Transcending the romanticism of the gangster film, the suspense of the crime caper and the racially biased depictions of criminality then prevalent in American popular culture, Parks coaxed his camera to record reality so vividly and compellingly that it would allow Life's readers to see the complexity of these chronically oversimplified situations. The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 includes an expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks' original reportage.

Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant laborer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. He evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. The first African-American director to helm a major motion picture, he helped launch the blaxploitation genre with his film Shaft (1971). Parks died in 2006.

Parks and Ellison collaborated on two historic photo-essays, now published in full for the first time

It is relatively unknown that the photographer Gordon Parks was close friends with Ralph Ellison, author of the acclaimed 1952 novel Invisible Man. Even less known is the fact that their common vision of racial injustices, coupled with a shared belief in the communicative power of photography, inspired collaboration on two important projects, in 1948 and 1952. Capitalizing on the growing popularity of the picture press, Parks and Ellison first joined forces on an essay titled Harlem Is Nowhere for '48: The Magazine of the Year.

Conceived while Ellison was already three years into writing Invisible Man, this illustrated essay was centered on the Lafargue Clinic, the first non-segregated psychiatric clinic in New York City, as a case study for the social and economic conditions in Harlem. He chose Parks to create the accompanying photographs, and during the winter of 1948, the two roamed the streets of Harlem, with Parks photographing under the guidance of Ellison's writing. In 1952 the two collaborated again on A Man Becomes Invisible for the August 25 issue of Life, which promoted Ellison's newly released novel. This is the first publication on Parks' and Ellison's two collaborations, one of which was lost, while the other was published only in reduced form.

Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. In addition to his storied tenures photographing for the Farm Security Administration (1941-45) and Life (1948-72), Parks found success as a film director, introducing Blaxploitation through his film Shaft (1971). Parks died in 2006.

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913. He enrolled at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, as a music major and later turned to writing essays and short stories for publications such as New Masses, The Negro Quarterly, The New Republic and Saturday Review. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison published two collections of essays: Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). He died in 1994.

Injustice, violence, the Civil Rights Movement, fashion and the arts--Gordon Parks captured half a century of the vast changes to the American cultural landscape in his multifaceted career. I Am You: Selected Works 1934-1978 reveals the breadth of his work as the first African American photographer for Vogue and Life magazines as well as a filmmaker and writer.

Reportage for major magazines dominated Parks' work from 1948 to 1972. He chronicled black America's struggle for equality, exposing the harsh realities of life in Harlem, institutionalized racism and shocking poverty. Parks was equally accomplished as a portraitist, capturing figures such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Duke Ellington and Ingrid Bergman. He turned his attention to film in the 1960s with social documentaries, as well as the cult classic Shaft (1971).

This volume traces all the threads of Parks' achievement, examining the interaction between his photographic and filmic visions.

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was born in Fort Scott, Kansas. He worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself, and becoming a photographer. In addition to his tenures photographing for the Farm Security Administration (1941-45) and Life (1948-72), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. He wrote numerous memoirs, novels and poetry, and received many awards, including the National Medal of Arts and more than 50 honorary degrees.

The extraordinary story of one Life photo-essay by Gordon Parks and its impact

This book explores a once-popular picture story by Gordon Parks and the extraordinary chain of events it prompted. Published in Life magazine in June 1961 as Poverty: Freedom's Fearful Foe, this empathetic photo-essay profiled the da Silva family, living in a hillside favela near a wealthy enclave of Rio de Janeiro. Focused primarily on the eldest son Flavio, an industrious 12-year-old suffering from crippling asthma, Parks' story elicited more than 3,000 letters and $25,000 in donations from Life readers to help the family and the favela.

In Brazil the story sparked controversy; one news magazine, O Cruzeiro, retaliated against Life and sent photographer Henri Ballot to document poverty in New York City. Undeterred, Life embarked on a multi-year rescue effort that involved moving Flavio to a Denver hospital, relocating the family to a new home and administering funds to support the favela. The story, as well as Parks' relationship to Flavio, continued to develop over many years. The details of this extraordinary history provide a fascinating example of US exceptionalism during the early 1960s and a revealing look inside the power and cultural force of the Great American Magazine.

In 1948, Gordon Parks began his professional relationship with Life magazine that would last 22 years. For his first project, he proposed a series of pictures about the gang wars that were then plaguing Harlem, believing that if he could draw attention to the problem then perhaps it would be addressed through social programs or government intervention. As a result of his efforts, Parks gained the trust of one particular group of gang members and their leader, Leonard Red Jackson, and produced a series of pictures of them that are artful, emotive, poignant, touching and sometimes shocking. From this larger body of work, 21 pictures were selected for reproduction in a graphic and adventurous layout in Life magazine. At each step of the selection process--as Parks chose each shot, or as the picture editors at Life re-selected from his selection--any intended narrative was complicated by another curatorial voice. Featuring contact sheets, proof prints and the published Life article, Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument traces this editorial process and parses out the various voices and motives behind the production of the picture essay. Co-published by The Gordon Parks Foundation and the New Orleans Museum of Art.