38 Facts About Gordon Parks

1.

Gordon Parks is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s, for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.

2.

Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of Andrew Jackson Gordon Parks and Sarah Ross, on November 30,1912.

3.

Gordon Parks's father was a farmer who grew corn, beets, turnips, potatoes, collard greens, and tomatoes.

4.

Gordon Parks related in a documentary on his life that his teacher told him that his desire to go to college would be a waste of money.

5.

When Gordon Parks was 11 years old, three white boys threw him into the Marmaton River, believing he couldn't swim.

6.

Gordon Parks had the presence of mind to duck underwater so they wouldn't see him make it to land.

7.

Gordon Parks spent his last night at the family home sleeping beside his mother's coffin, seeking not only solace, but a way to face his own fear of death.

8.

At the age of twenty eight, Gordon Parks was struck by photographs of migrant workers in a magazine.

9.

Gordon Parks bought his first camera, a Voigtlander Brillant, for $12.50 at a Seattle, Washington, pawnshop and taught himself how to take photos.

10.

Gordon Parks encouraged Parks and his wife, Sally Alvis, to move to Chicago in 1940, where he began a portrait business and specialized in photographs of society women.

11.

Gordon Parks began to chronicle the city's South Side black ghetto and, in 1941, an exhibition of those photographs won Parks a photography fellowship with the FSA.

12.

Gordon Parks's "haunting" photograph shows a black woman, Ella Watson, who worked on the cleaning crew of the FSA building, standing stiffly in front of an American flag hanging on the wall, a broom in one hand and a mop in the background.

13.

Gordon Parks had been inspired to create the image after encountering racism repeatedly in restaurants and shops in the segregated capital city.

14.

Gordon Parks urged Parks to keep working with Watson, which led to a series of photographs of her daily life.

15.

Gordon Parks said later that his first image was overdone and not subtle; other commentators have argued that it drew strength from its polemical nature and its duality of victim and survivor, and thus affected far more people than his subsequent pictures of Mrs Watson.

16.

Gordon Parks was unable to follow the group in the overseas war theatre, so he resigned from the OW.

17.

Gordon Parks renewed his search for photography jobs in the fashion world.

18.

For over 20 years, Gordon Parks produced photographs on subjects including fashion, sports, Broadway, poverty, and racial segregation, as well as portraits of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, and Barbra Streisand.

19.

An exhibition of photographs from a 1950 project Gordon Parks completed for Life was exhibited in 2015 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

20.

Gordon Parks returned to his hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas, where segregation persisted, and he documented conditions in the community and the contemporary lives of many of his 11 classmates from the segregated middle school they attended.

21.

Gordon Parks later directed a series of documentaries on black ghetto life that were commissioned by National Educational Television.

22.

Gordon Parks wrote the screenplay and composed the musical score for the film, with assistance from his friend, the composer Henry Brant.

23.

Shaft, a 1971 detective film directed by Gordon Parks and starring Richard Roundtree as John Shaft, became a major hit that spawned a series of films that would be labeled as blaxploitation.

24.

Gordon Parks's feel for settings was confirmed by Shaft, with its portrayal of the super-cool leather-clad, black private detective hired to find the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem racketeer.

25.

Gordon Parks directed the 1972 sequel, Shaft's Big Score, in which the protagonist finds himself caught in the middle of rival gangs of racketeers.

26.

Gordon Parks's first job was as a piano player in a brothel when he was a teenager.

27.

Gordon Parks composed Concerto for Piano and Orchestra at the encouragement of black American conductor Dean Dixon and Dixon's wife Vivian, a pianist, and with the help of the composer Henry Brant.

28.

Gordon Parks authored several books of poetry, which he illustrated with his own photographs, and he wrote three volumes of memoirs: A Choice of Weapons, Voices in the Mirror, and A Hungry Heart.

29.

In 1981, Gordon Parks turned to fiction with Shannon, a novel about Irish immigrants fighting their way up the social ladder in turbulent early 20th-century New York.

30.

Gordon Parks's writing accomplishments include novels, poetry, autobiography, and non-fiction, including both photographic instructional manuals and books about filmmaking.

31.

In 1970, Gordon Parks helped found Essence magazine, and served as its editorial director during the first three years of its circulation.

32.

Gordon Parks married Sally Alvis in Minneapolis in 1933 and they divorced in 1961, after more than 25 years.

33.

Gordon Parks first met Chinese-American editor Genevieve Young in 1962 when he began writing The Learning Tree.

34.

Gordon Parks was a longtime resident of Greenburgh, New York in Westchester County, New York, and his house was landmarked in 2007.

35.

The LOC holds Gordon Parks's published and unpublished scores, and several of his films and television productions.

36.

In 2008, the Gordon Parks Foundation selected WSU as repository for 140 boxes of his photos, manuscripts, letters and other papers.

37.

Gordon Parks first returned for a residency in 1984, sponsored by the local newspaper The Manhattan Mercury for its centennial; he returned for another in 1985, initiated by the Manhattan Arts Council and sponsored by the city and various community organizations and individuals.

38.

Work by Gordon Parks is held in the following public collections:.