Gordon Parks photographs, 1947-1967

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was a pioneering African-American photographer and filmmaker. Moving from job to job during the Depression, he eventually discovered photography and was largely self-taught, working mostly in cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago. With financial support from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, he went to Washington, DC with the hope of joining the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which since its establishment in 1937 had sent photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein to locations throughout the United States to document the impact of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression.

Parks's time in DC was not easy. He had experienced racial discrimination throughout his youth, but claimed his time in DC was among the worst. Rather than photographing racists and examples of their actions subjected onto him and other people of color, Parks decided instead to utilize the camera to tell the story of victims, not just of racism, but poverty and other forms of injustice. He would return to these subjects over and over through the decades, working mostly as a photojournalist, to capture the lives of these individuals living on the margins of society.

Working as a freelance photographer in the mid-1940s magazines such as Glamour and Ebony, Parks proposed a photojournalistic segment to Life magazine about the people of Harlem. The illustrated article, published in November 1948, recounted the story of of Red Jackson, leader of the Midtowners, a Harlem gang. The brutally honest and humanistic narrative and images earned Parks fame and a position at Life as their first Black staff photographer. He worked at the magazine for twenty years, producing compelling exposés of racial injustice and poverty, while also covering stories ranging from fashion to sports. In the 1960s he photographed the Civil Rights movement and the impact of segregation throughout the South. He also photographed compelling portraits of civil rights leaders in action, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael.

In 1969 Parks became the first Black filmmaker to write and direct a major Hollywood studio motion picture, The Learning Tree, based on his semiautobiographical novel. Over the course of his career, he moved into writing books, composing musical scores, and making more films, but he never stopped taking pictures with his camera. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and received over fifty honorary degrees from universities before his death in New York in 2006.