Gordon Parks

A Black youth in rural Kansas of the 1920's must make a difficult decision after he witnesses a murder

The Learning Tree

Gordon Parks -- photographer for 'Life' magazine, writer, composer, artist, and filmmaker -- was only 16 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 the brutal Minnesota winter, to educate himself, and to 'prove my worth.' Working at a succession of jobs from janitor to railroad porter to busboy to musician to professional basketball player, in such places as St. Paul, Chicago, and New York, Parks struggled against poverty and racism, not just to avoid failure but to achieve success. He taught himself photography with a secondhand camera, worked for local newspapers serving the black community, and ... began to document the poverty among blacks on Chicago's South Side. His portfolio won him a year-long fellowship, which he spent with the Farm Security Administration ...

A Choice of Weapons

In September 1956, Life magazine published a photo-essay by Gordon Parks entitled "The Restraints: Open and Hidden," which documented the everyday activities and rituals of one extended African American family living in the rural South under Jim Crow segregation. One of the most powerful photographs depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson and her niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing in front of a theater in Mobile, Alabama, an image which became a forceful "weapon of choice," as Parks would say, in the struggle against racism and segregation. While 26 photographs were eventually published in Life and some were exhibited in his lifetime, the bulk of Parks' assignment was thought to be lost. In 2011, five years after Parks' death, The Gordon Parks Foundation discovered more than 70 color transparencies at the bottom of an old storage bin marked "Segregation Series" that are now published for the first time in Segregation Story.

segregation story

The famed photographer, film director, writer, and composer recounts the dramatic story of his life, from his poor Kansas origins, through his breaking of racial barriers, to his triumph in America and abroad. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

An Autobiography

Voices In The Mirror

Choice of Weapons

The Choice of Weapons

An account of the artist's life from 1944 through 1978 focuses on the prime of his career as poet, journalist, humanitarian, composer, and motion-picture director

A Memoir

To Smile in Autumn

Philip Brookman

Covers the author's photographic work with Life magazine

A Retrospective

Half Past Autumn

In Eyes with Winged Thoughts, the forty-four photographs and fifty-eight poems, reflecting on his long and extraordinary life, offer a rare glimpse of his thoughts and feelings about everything from romantic love to the Iraq war and the passing of Pope John Paul II. He has done it all. Gordon Parks's life is an astonishing litany of firsts: in the 1940s he was the first African-American photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration and for Vogue and Life magazines; in the 1960s he would become the first African-American director of a major motion picture. A dominating figure in contemporary American culture, he is an artist of uncompromising vision and creativity. In 2002 Parks received the Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, just the latest in a series of honors that began when he received a prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941 and which now includes an Emmy, a National Medal of the Arts, and over fifty honorary doctorates. Now in his nineties, he could easily rest on his laurels, but the luminous photographs on display in Eyes with Winged Thoughts and the poems -- some meditative and lyrical, some raw with emotion about the war in Iraq and the tragedy of the tsunami -- show that he is still a true American Renaissance man.

Poems and Photographs

Eyes with Winged Thoughts

John Loengard

This is a volume of living history - the history of our times, as seen by the photographers who captured it. It is the most comprehensive anthology of LIFE photography ever assembled, and illustrates the strengths that made many of these individuals famous - and LIFE great. This book, an enormous international success in hardback, is now available in a new, compact, paperback edition.

The Great Life Photographers

Kansas State University, Department of Art

The Gordon Parks Collection

The eminent photographer, composer, filmmaker, and writer reflects on his personal life and professional achievements, describing his disadvantaged childhood, his Depression-era years, and the prestigious awards he has received.

Gordon Parks

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