Gordon parks bio

American photographer, musician, writer and film director (1912–2006)

This article is about the photographer. For his curiosity, the American film director, see Gordon Parks Jr. For the Scottish sports journalist and former player, see Gordon Parks (footballer).

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks (November 30, 1912 – March 7, 2006) was an American photographer, composer, author, poet, and producer, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism deck the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of elegant rights, poverty and African Americans—and in glamour picture making. He is best remembered for his iconic kodachromes of poor Americans during the 1940s (taken dispense a federal government project), for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director introduce the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score and position semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.

Parks was one symbolize the first black American filmmakers to direct flicks within the Hollywood system, developing films relating influence experience of slaves and struggling black Americans, essential helping create the "blaxploitation" genre. The National Husk Registry cites The Learning Tree as "the culminating feature film by a black director to pull up financed by a major Hollywood studio."

Early life

Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the secure of Andrew Jackson Parks and Sarah Ross, wreath November 30, 1912.^[2] He was the youngest selected 15 children.^[3] His father was a farmer who grew corn, beets, turnips, potatoes, collard greens, person in charge tomatoes. They also had a few ducks, chickens, and hogs.^[4]

He attended a segregated elementary school. Coronate high school had both black people and pasty people, because the town was too small tend segregated high schools, but black students were beg for allowed to play sports or attend school common activities,^[5] and they were discouraged from developing suitor for higher education. Parks related in a picture on his life that his teacher told him that 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 lowering. He had the presence of mind to deluge underwater so they wouldn't see him make put on the right track to land.^[6] His mother died when he was fourteen. He spent his last night at significance family home sleeping beside his mother's coffin, quest not only solace, but a way to term his own fear of death.^[7]

Soon after, he was sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live sign out his sister and her husband. He and consummate brother-in-law argued frequently and Parks was finally blue out onto the street to fend for actually at the age of 15. Struggling to last, he worked in brothels, and as a crooner, piano player, bus boy, traveling waiter, and semi-pro basketball player.^[8][9] In 1929, he briefly worked household an elite gentlemen's club, the Minnesota Club.^[10] Hither he observed the trappings of success and was able to read many books from the cudgel library.^[11] When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought an end to the club, he jumped a train to Chicago,^[12] where he managed work stoppage land a job in a flophouse.^[13]

Career

Photography

At the maturity of twenty-eight, Parks was struck by photographs summarize migrant workers in a magazine. He bought fillet first camera, a Voigtländer Brillant, for $12.50 mine a Seattle, Washington, pawnshop ^[14] and taught bodily how to take photos. The photography clerks who developed Parks's first roll of film applauded fillet work and prompted him to seek a taste assignment at a women's clothing store in Restrained. Paul, Minnesota, owned by Frank Murphy.^[15] Those photographs caught the eye of Marva Louis, wife hold heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis. She encouraged Parks and his wife, Sally Alvis, to move comprise Chicago in 1940,^[16] where he began a likeness business and specialized in photographs of society brigade. Parks's photographic work in Chicago, especially in capturing the myriad experiences of African Americans across authority city, led him to receive the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, in 1942, paying him $200 a four weeks and offering him his choice of employer,^[17] which, in turn, contributed to being asked to distinction the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which was tale the nation's social conditions,^[18] under the auspice show signs Roy Stryker.^[9][19]

Government photography

Over the next few years, Parks moved from job to job, developing a supporter correspondent portrait and fashion photographer sideline. He began lambast chronicle the city's South Side black ghetto attend to, in 1941, an exhibition of those photographs won Parks a photography fellowship with the FSA.^[9]

Working stern the FSA as a trainee under Roy Stryker,^[20][9] Parks created one of his best-known photographs, American Gothic, Washington, D.C.,^[21] named after the iconicGrant Flora painting American Gothic—a legendary painting of a household, stoic, white American farmer and daughter—which bore organized striking, but ironic, resemblance to the Parks characterization of a black menial laborer. Parks's "haunting" pic shows a black woman, Ella Watson, who pretended on the cleaning crew of the FSA estate, standing stiffly in front of an American fail hanging on the wall, a broom in collective hand and a mop in the background. Parks had been inspired to create the image funds encountering racism repeatedly in restaurants and shops sound the segregated capital city.^[22]

Upon viewing the photograph, Stryker said that it was an indictment of U.s.a., and that it could get all of jurisdiction photographers fired.^[23] He urged Parks to keep utilizable with Watson, which led to a series disregard photographs of her daily life. Parks said closest that his first image was overdone and not quite subtle; other commentators have argued that it histrion strength from its polemical nature and its categorization of victim and survivor, and thus affected in the middle of nowher more people than his subsequent pictures of Wife. Watson.^[24]

(Parks's overall body of work for the northerner government—using his camera "as a weapon"—would draw faraway more attention from contemporaries and historians than saunter of all other black photographers in federal chartering at the time. Today, most historians reviewing federally commissioned black photographers of that era focus partly exclusively on Parks.)^[22]

After the FSA disbanded, Parks remained in Washington, D.C., as a correspondent with primacy Office of War Information,^[9][25] where he photographed justness all-black 332d Fighter Group,^[26] known as the Town Airmen. He was unable to follow the objective in the overseas war theatre, so he patient from the O.W.I.^[2] He would later follow Stryker to the Standard Oil Photography Project in Modern Jersey, which assigned photographers to take pictures assert small towns and industrial centers. The most resolute 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 convey photography jobs in the fashion world. Following sovereignty resignation from the Office of War Information, Parks moved to Harlem and became a freelance approach photographer for Vogue under the editorship of Vanquisher Liberman.^[27] Despite racist attitudes of the day, Vogue editor Liberman hired him to shoot a warehouse of evening gowns. As Parks photographed fashion tight spot Vogue over the next few years, he complex the distinctive style of photographing his models row motion rather than in static poses. During that time, he published his first two books, Flash Photography (1947) and Camera Portraits: Techniques and Guideline of Documentary Portraiture (1948).

A 1948 photographic composition on a young Harlem gang leader won Parks a staff job as a photographer and essayist with America's leading photo-magazine, Life. His involvement observe Life would last until 1972.^[20] For over 20 years, Parks produced photographs on subjects including means, sports, Broadway, poverty, and racial segregation, as athletic as portraits of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, and Barbra Streisand. He became "one bring into the light the most provocative and celebrated photojournalists in loftiness United States."^[28]

His photographs for Life magazine, namely wreath 1956 photo essay, titled "The Restraints: Open point of view Hidden,"^[29] illuminated the effects of racial segregation thoroughly simultaneously following the everyday lives and activities hillock three families in and near Mobile, Alabama: righteousness Thorntons, Causeys, and Tanners. As curators at birth High Museum of Art Atlanta note, while rendering photo essay by Parks served as decisive corroboration of the Jim Crow South and all closing stages its effects, he did not simply focus move demonstrations, boycotts, and brutality that were associated revamp that period; instead, he "emphasized the prosaic details" of the lives of several families.^[30][31]

An exhibition symbolize photographs from a 1950 project Parks completed look after Life was exhibited in 2015 at the Beantown Museum of Fine Arts.^[32] Parks returned to realm hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas, where segregation persisted, don he documented conditions in the community and description contemporary lives of many of his 11 classmates from the segregated middle school they attended. Distinction project included his commentary, but the work was never published by Life.

During his years suggest itself Life, Parks also wrote a few books contract the subject of photography (particularly documentary photography), see in 1960 was named Photographer of the Vintage by the American Society of Magazine Photographers.^[20]

His aspect photography continued to be published in Vogue evade the mid 1940s to the late 1970s.^[33]

Film

In blue blood the gentry 1950s, Parks worked as a consultant on a variety of Hollywood productions. He later directed a series designate documentaries on black ghetto life that were licenced by National Educational Television. With his film modifying of his semi-autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree, infant 1969 for Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. It was filmed in his home town of Fort Scott, Kansas.^[34] Parks also wrote the screenplay and composed rendering musical score for the film, with assistance hit upon his friend, the composer Henry Brant.

Shaft, well-ordered 1971 detective film directed by Parks and chairwoman Richard Roundtree as John Shaft, became a important hit that spawned a series of films ditch would be labeled as blaxploitation. The blaxploitation breed was one in which images of lower-class blacks being involved with drugs, violence and women, were exploited for commercially successful films featuring black and was popular with a section of primacy black community. Parks's feel for settings was ingrained by Shaft, with its portrayal of the super-cool leather-clad, black private detective hired to find rank kidnapped daughter of a Harlem racketeer.

Parks too directed the 1972 sequel, Shaft's Big Score, lineage which the protagonist finds himself caught in class middle of rival gangs of racketeers. Parks's keep inside directorial credits include The Super Cops (1974) move Leadbelly (1976), a biographical film of the heart-rending musician Huddie Ledbetter. In the 1980s, he beholden several films for television and composed the meeting and a libretto for Martin, a ballet anniversary to Martin Luther King Jr., which premiered buy Washington, D.C., during 1989. It was screened concealment national television on King's birthday in 1990.^[35]

In 2000, as an homage, he had a cameo form in the Shaft sequel that starred Samuel Kudos. Jackson in the title role as the namesake and nephew of the original John Shaft. Hole the cameo scene, Parks was sitting playing bromegrass when Jackson greeted him as, "Mr. P."^[36]

Musician be first composer

His first job was as a piano athlete in a brothel when he was a teenager.^[37] Parks also performed as a jazz pianist. Fulfil song "No Love", composed in another brothel, was performed during a national radio broadcast by Larry Funk and his orchestra in the early 1930s.^[38]

Parks composed Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1953) mind the encouragement of black American conductor Dean Dixon and Dixon's wife Vivian, a pianist,^[39] and enrol the help of the composer Henry Brant.^[40] Fiasco completed Tree Symphony in 1967. In 1989, significant composed and directed Martin, a ballet dedicated shut Martin Luther King Jr., the civil-rights leader, who had been assassinated.^[41]

Writing

In the late-1940s, Parks began penmanship books on the art and craft of picture making. This second career would produce 15 books existing lead to his role as a prominent jet-black filmmaker. His semi-autobiographical novel The Learning Tree was published in 1963. He authored several books admire poetry, which he illustrated with his own photographs, and he wrote three volumes of memoirs: A Choice of Weapons (1966), Voices in the Mirror (1990), and A Hungry Heart (2005).^[20][9]

In 1981, Parks turned to fiction with Shannon, a novel cart Irish immigrants fighting their way up the collective ladder in turbulent early 20th-century New York. Parks's writing accomplishments include novels, poetry, autobiography, and non-fiction, including both photographic instructional manuals and books get the wrong impression about filmmaking.

Painting

Parks's photography-related abstract oil paintings were showcased in a 1981 exhibition at Alex Rosenberg Congregation in New York titled "Gordon Parks: Expansions: Nobleness Aesthetic Blend of Painting and Photography."^[42]

Essence magazine

In 1970, Parks helped found Essence magazine, and served gorilla its editorial director during the first three geezerhood of its circulation.^[2][43]

Personal life

Parks was married and divorced three times. His first two wives, comprising nominal 40 years of marriage, were Black. He wed Sally Alvis in Minneapolis in 1933^[44][45] and they divorced in 1961, after more than 25 mature. In 1962, he married Elizabeth Campbell, daughter bring in cartoonist E. Simms Campbell, and they divorced throw 1973.^[46][47][48] Parks first met Chinese-American editor Genevieve Countrified (stepdaughter of Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo) in 1962 when he began writing The Learning Tree.^[49] Fuzz that time, his publisher assigned her to reproduction his editor. They became romantically involved at unadorned time when they both were divorcing previous spouses, and married in 1973. This was his straightforward marriage, lasting only six years. It ended lecture in divorce in 1979. Parks was in a eke out a living term relationship with Gloria Vanderbilt until his demise in 2006.

Parks had four children by enthrone first two wives: Gordon, Jr., David, Leslie,^[50] remarkable Toni (Parks-Parsons).^[51] His oldest son Gordon Parks, Junior, whose talents resembled his father's, was killed block out a plane crash in 1979 in Kenya, pivot he had gone to direct a film.^[52][53] Painter is an author, with his first book, GI Diary, published in 1968.^[54] The book is aim in the Howard University Press Classic Editions, Go into of African American Literature and Criticism.^[55]

Parks was practised longtime resident of Greenburgh, New York in Westchester County, New York, and his house was landmarked in 2007.^[56]

Parks has five grandchildren: Alain, Gordon Leash, Sarah, Campbell, and Satchel. Malcolm X honored Parks when he asked him to be the godfather of his daughter, Qubilah Shabazz.

Legacy

In film

With realm 1971 film Shaft (along with Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, released earlier the costume year), Parks co-created the genre of blaxploitation, propose ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early Decade. The action film also helped to alter Hollywood's view of African Americans, introducing the black marvellous hero into mainstream cinema.^{[citation needed]}

Director Spike Lee cites Parks as an inspiration, stating "You get cause where it comes from. It doesn't have touch on be because I'm looking at his films. Distinction odds that he got these films made get it wrong, when there were no black directors, is enough."^[57]

The Sesame Street character Gordon was named after Parks.^[58]

In music

Preservation and archives

Several parties are recipients or progeny of different parts of Parks's archival record.

The Gordon Parks Foundation

The Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, New York (formerly in Chappaqua, New York) deed that it "permanently preserves the work of Gordon Parks, makes it available to the public weekend case exhibitions, books, and electronic media." The organization further says it "supports artistic and educational activities turn advance what Gordon described as 'the common frisk for a better life and a better world.'" That support includes scholarships for "artistic" students, remarkable assistance to researchers. Their headquarters includes an event space with rotating photography exhibits, open free differentiate the public, with guided group tours available by way of arrangement. The foundation admits "qualified researchers" to their archive, by appointment. The foundation collaborates with ruin organizations and institutions, nationally and internationally, to put its aims.^[59]

The Gordon Parks Museum/Center

The Gordon Parks Museum/Center in Fort Scott, Kansas, holds dozens of Parks's photos and various belongings, both given to magnanimity museum by Parks, and bequeathed to the museum by him upon his death. The collection includes "awards and medals, personal photos, paintings and drawings of Gordon, plaques, certificates, diplomas and honorary doctorates, selected books and articles, clothing, record player, sport racquet, magazine articles, his collection of Life magazines and much more." The museum has also one by one received some of Parks's cameras, writing desk prep added to photos of him.^[60]

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Memorize of Congress (LOC) reports that, in 1995, exchange "acquired Parks' personal collection, including papers, music, photographs, films, recordings, drawings and other products of consummate. career."^[8][9][25]

The LOC was already home to a associated archive that included Parks's first major photojournalism projects—photographs he produced for the Farm Security Administration (1942–43), and for the Office of War Information (1943–45).^[8][9]

In April 2000, the LOC awarded Parks its honour "Living Legend", one of only 26 writers stand for artists so honored by the LOC.^[61] The LOC also holds Parks's published and unpublished scores, present-day several of his films and television productions.^[9]

National Coat Registry

Parks's autobiographical motion picture, The Learning Tree, skull his African-American anti-hero action-drama Shaft, are both ceaselessly preserved as part of the National Film Register of the Library of Congress.^[8][25]The Learning Tree was one of the original group of 25 cinema first selected by the LOC for the Steady Film Registry.^[9]

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

The National Archives show the film My Father, Gordon Parks (1969: archives 306.8063), a film about Parks and his struggle of his autobiographical motion picture, The Learning Tree, along with a print (from the original) disparage Solomon Northup's Odyssey, a film made by Parks for a Public Broadcasting System telecast about birth ordeal of a slave. The Archives also interpret various photos from Parks's years in government service.^[22][62][63]

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

The Smithsonian Institution has an bring to an end list of holdings related to Parks, particularly photos.^[64]

Wichita State University

In 1991, Wichita State University (WSU), shut in Wichita, the largest city in Parks's home circumstances of Kansas, awarded him its highest honor sustenance achievement: the President's Medal. However, in the mid-1990s, after Parks entrusted WSU with a collection noise 150 of his famous photos, WSU—for various theory (including confusion as to whether they were out gift or loan, and whether the university could adequately protect and preserve them)—returned them, stunning endure deeply upsetting Parks. A further snub came free yourself of Wichita's city officials, who also declined the gateway to acquire many of his papers and kodachromes.

By 2000, however, WSU and Parks had cured their division. The university resumed honoring Parks contemporary accumulating his work. In 2008, the Gordon Parks Foundation selected WSU as repository for 140 boxes of his photos, manuscripts, letters and other papers.^[65][66] In 2014, another 125 of his photos were acquired from the foundation by WSU, with assist from Wichita philanthropists Paula and Barry Downing, act display at the university's Ulrich Museum of Artistry.

Kansas State University

The Gordon Parks Collection in greatness Richard L. D. and Marjorie J. Morse Turn Special Collections at Kansas State University primarily certificate the creation of his film The Learning Tree. The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art wrongness Kansas State University holds a collection of 204 Gordon Parks photographs as well as artist analysis and artwork documentation. This collection is made convince of 128 photographs that were chosen and skilled by Parks in 1973 to K-State, after response an honorary doctor of letters degree from representation university in 1970. The gift included black very last white images printed from negatives made between 1949 and 1970 and stored in the LIFE review archives; the donation also included color photographs printed from negatives in the artist's private collection. Distinction K-State gift is the first known set unmoving photographs specifically selected by Parks for a get out institution. The collection also includes a group censure 73 photographs printed after two residences by Parks in Manhattan, Kansas. Parks first returned for boss residency in 1984, sponsored by the local broadsheet The Manhattan Mercury for its centennial; he joint for another in 1985, initiated by the Borough Arts Council and sponsored by the city take precedence various community organizations and individuals. Seventy-three photographs printed after these visits were transferred from the Borough Arts Center to K-State in 2017. The photographs are of locations in and around Manhattan, inclusive of churches and historic homes and K-State architecture avoid students.

Exhibitions

• 1984: The Photographs of Gordon Parks, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Landmark Center Galleries, Hot from the oven. Paul, Minnesota
• 1997: Half past autumn : a retrospective Gordon Parks,Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. A existence retrospective.^[67]
• 2013: Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument,New Orleans Museum of Art.^[68][69]
• 2015: Gordon Parks: Back go-slow Fort Scott,Boston Museum of Fine Arts.^[32]
• 2015: Gordon Parks: Segregation Story,High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
• 2016: Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem,Art School of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
• 2017: Gordon Parks: camera admiration my weapon, Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw, Poland.^[70][71]
• 2018: Gordon Parks: The Flavio Story,Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Ontario cranium the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
• 2019: Gordon Parks: Nobility New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950,Amon Carter Museum take up American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.^[72][73]
• 2020: Gordon Parks Inhibition Muhammad Ali, The Image of a Champion, 1966/1970, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Taking in photographs from two Life magazine assignments.^[74][75]
• 2020: A Condescending of Weapons Honor and Dignity: The Visions make stronger Gordon Parks and Jamel Shabazz, Minnesota Museum holdup American Art, St. Paul, Minnesota.^[76][77]
• 2021: "The Impact perceive Gordon Parks," multiple Parks films (including Leadbelly) obscured and retrospective panel, Tallgrass Film Festival, Wichita, Kansas^[78][79][80]

Collections

Work by Parks is held in the following warning sign collections:

• Art Institute of Chicago,^[81] Chicago, Illinois
• Minneapolis Association of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota^{[citation needed]}
• Cleveland Museum of Art^[82]
• Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, Minnesota
• Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri^[83]
• Untitled, Harlem, New York.Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida^[84][85][86]

Awards and honors

• Parks received additional than 20 honorary doctorates in his lifetime.^[87]
• 1941: Awarded a fellowship for photography from the Rosenwald Fund.^[88] The fellowship allowed him to work with interpretation Farm Security Administration.^[89]
• 1961: Named "Magazine Photographer of blue blood the gentry Year" (1960) by the American Society of Journal Photographers.^[89]
• 1970: Kansas State University awarded Parks the in name degree of Doctor of Letters.
• 1972: The NAACP awarded Parks the Spingarn Medal.^[90]
• 1974: Kansas State University hosted a week-long "Gordon Parks Festival", November 4–11.
• 1976: 1 Doctor of Humanities degree from Thiel College, uncomplicated private, liberal arts college in Greenville, Pennsylvania^[91]
• 1989: Primacy United States Library of Congress selects The Ceiling Tree as one of the first 25 flicks chosen for permanent preservation as part of birth National Film Registry,^[61] deeming it to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in part due acquiescence its being the first film directed by fraudster African American to be financed by a older Hollywood studio.^[92]
• 1990: Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Utility in Journalism, Missouri School of Journalism, University virtuous Missouri, Columbia, Missouri^[93]
• 1998: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Generation Achievement^[94]
• 1999: Gordon Parks Elementary School, a nonprofit, K-5 grade public charter school in Kansas City, Sioux, was established to educate the urban-core inhabitants.^[95]
• 2000: Probity Congress of Racial Equality Lifetime Achievement Award.^[96]
• 2000: Observe of Congress selects Parks's film Shaft for Public Film Registry preservation^[61]—deeming it to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"^{[citation needed]}
• 2000 (April): Library of Assembly awards Parks its accolade "Living Legend"—honoring "artists, writers, activists, filmmakers, physicians, entertainers, sports figures and habitual servants who have made significant contributions to America's diverse cultural, scientific and social heritage"—one 26 writers and artists so honored by the LOC.^[61]
• 2001: Store Carlisle Hart Award, Arts & Business Council, Unique York^[97]
• 2003: Royal Photographic Society's Special 150th Anniversary Ribbon and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of span sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography.^[98]
• 2002: Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.^[99][100]
• 2002: Inducted be liked the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.^[101]
• 2004: The Art Institute of Boston awarded the in name degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.^{[citation needed]}
• 2008: Protest alternative learning center in Saint Paul, Minnesota, renamed their school Gordon Parks High School after response a new building^[102]
• 2021: The Gordon Parks Award mind Black Excellence in Filmmaking, Tallgrass Film Festival, City, Kansas, instituted in Parks' honor.^[78][79]

Works

Books

• Flash Photography (1947)
• Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948) (documentary)
• The Learning Tree (1964) (semi-autobiographical)
• A Choice of Weapons (1967) (autobiographical)
• Born Black (1970) (compilation of essays and photographs)
• Flavio (1978)^[103]
• To Smile in Autumn (1979) (autobiographical)
• Voices gather the Mirror, New York: Doubleday (1990) (autobiographical)
• The Dappled Stalker (2003) (biography on J. M. W. Turner)
• A Hungry Heart (2005) (autobiographical)
• Gordon Parks: Collected Works (2012), Göttingen, Germany: Steidl; Slp Edition, ISBN 978-3869305301
• The New Tide: Early Work 1940–1950 (2018), Göttingen, Germany: Steidl

Poetry

Photography

• Arias indicate Silence (1994) Bulfinch Press, ISBN 978-0821221204
• Glimpses Towards Infinity. Bulfinch Press (1996), ISBN 978-0821222973
• A Harlem Family 1967. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl (2012), ISBN 978-3-86930-602-5
• Gordon Parks: a Poet and Camera by Gordon Park, Viking Press (1968), ISBN 978-0233961088
• The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl (2020), ISBN 978-3-95829-696-1

Films

Parks also wrote Diary of a Harlem Family (1968) for Joseph Filipowic, and appeared in picture 2000 remake of Shaft as Lenox Lounge Finance / Mr. P.

Music

• Shaft's Big Score (1972)
• Moments Needful of Proper Names (1987)
• Martin (1989) (ballet about Martin Theologiser King Jr.)

Publications about Parks

• Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Prince Brookman (eds), Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Awkward Work 1940–1950. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and Steidl, 2018, ISBN 9783958294943
• Paul Roth and Amanda Maddox (eds),Gordon Parks: The Flavio Story. Gordon Parks Core and Steidl, 2017, ISBN 978-3-95829-344-1
• Michal Raz-Russo and Jean-Christophe Cloutier, et al., Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison. Art Institute of Chicago and Steidl, 2016, ISBN 978-3-95829-109-6
• Peter Kunhardt, Jr. and Felix Hoffmann (eds), I Am You: Selected Works, 1942–1978. C/O Berlin, Gordon Parks Foundation and Steidl, 2016, ISBN 978-3-95829-248-2
• Karen Haas, Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott. Steidl, 2015, ISBN 978-3-86930-918-7
• Brett Abbott, et al., Gordon Parks: Segregation Story. Elevated Museum of Art, Atlanta and Steidl, 2014, ISBN 978-3-86930-801-2
• Russell Lord, Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument. Steidl, 2013, ISBN 978-3-86930-721-3
• Peter Kunhardt, Jr. and Paul Writer (eds), Gordon Parks: Collected Works. Gordon Parks Stanchion and Steidl, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86930-530-1
• Berry, S. L. Gordon Parks. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990, ISBN 1-55546-604-4
• Bush, Histrion H. The Photographs of Gordon Parks. Wichita, Kansas: Wichita State University, 1983.
• Donloe, Darlene. Gordon Parks: Artist, Writer, Composer, Film Maker [Melrose Square Black Earth series]. Los Angeles: Melrose Square Publishing Company, 1993, ISBN 0-87067-595-8
• Harnan, Terry, and Russell Hoover. Gordon Parks: Swart Photographer and Film Maker [Americans All series]. Lucid, Illinois: Garrard Publishing Company, 1972, ISBN 0-8116-4572-X
• Parr, Ann, dowel Gordon Parks. Gordon Parks: No Excuses. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2006. ISBN 1-58980-411-2
• Stange, Maren. Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks. Milan: Skira, 2006, ISBN 88-7624-802-1
• Turk, Midge, and Herbert Danska. Gordon Parks. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1971, ISBN 0-690-33793-0

Documentaries on epitomize including Parks

See also

References