Gordon Parks: renaissance man

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 1998 by Philip Brookman

In 1956, Parks ventured into the deep South, where he photographed an eloquent story about segregation. Working in a small town near Mobile, Ala., in the same year as the Montgomery bus boycott, he documented the effects of segregation on one African-American family. These images, such as "Willy Causey and Family, Shady Grove, Alabama," focus on many aspects of everyday life for three generations of the Causey family. Following publication of these pictures in Life, the Causey family was forced to flee their home, just as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum.

One of the most poignant and successful projects Parks completed for Lira was about Flavio Da Silva, a young boy he met in the slums of Brazil. In 1961, Parks was assigned to photograph poverty against a backdrop of cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro. Like his essays about Harlem gangs and segregation, he focused the impact of his theme on individuals. He photographed Flavio and his parents, brothers, and sisters living together in a one-room shack in the midst of extreme poverty. Parks shot and wrote about the family's reliance on their son, and documented his deteriorating health and its effect on the family, a story which has become a classic example of photojournalism. When it was published, readers of the magazine were moved to contribute money to help with Flavio's medical care. Eventually, he was brought to the U.S. for treatment, and other money contributed was used to buy a new home for his family and to help educate him and his siblings.

By the 1960s, Parks enjoyed status as one of the nation's most influential photojournalists. Along with many other projects, he continued his work documenting the civil rights movement. In 1963, he published an autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree, based on recollections of his childhood in Kansas. Life commissioned Parks to create a series of photographs that evoked the personal memories captured in the book. These images were published in the magazine with his memoir, "How It Feels to Be Black," an emotional essay that brought together his personal and social concerns. That same year, he documented the Black Muslims, including Malcolm X, in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, detailing the development of education and self-reliance in this emerging religious and social movement.

When Life printed Parks' passionate close-up of a crying girl's face on the cover of a 1967 issue about poverty in the U.S., he again connected readers to the real-life emotions of one family. For this assignment, he photographed the Fontennelle family at home in a Harlem tenement, evoking their personal straggles and the children's perseverance.

Parks began to manipulate color photographs in 1958. The following year, Life published a series of pictures that were made to accompany poems he selected. These works evoke the rhythmic visual imagery found in the poetry. His experiments include multiple exposures, collage, and painting on pictures. Parks has continued this process through the present, and has evolved a lyrical style that fluctuates between realism and abstraction. His most recent works, made in the 1990s and printed with the aid of computer imaging as Iris ink-jet prints, are abstract landscapes, photographed in the studio using combinations of shells, flowers, paintings, and complex lighting.