Gordon Parks: soulscapes - photographer's landscape images - Cover Story

American Visions, Feb-March, 1993 by A.D. Coleman

Who would have expected Gordon Parks - at the ripe old age of 80-to become a landscape photographer, or to accomplish this feat without leaving the comfort of his Manhattan living room?

Parks is known for many things. He is the motion picture director who, with The Learning Tree, became the first black to produce and direct a feature film for a major studio; a composer whose orchestral music has been performed internationally; and the author of no fewer than four autobiographies and a recently completed work based on the life of the 19th-century English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner. And he is, of course, a photographer, best known as such for the now-classic black-and-white documentary and photojournalistic images he produced for the Farm Security Administration and later for Life magazine.

Still photography - the first medium that Parks mastered, the one that served as his ticket out of poverty, the one that, as he fondly acknowledges, "made all the other things possible" - had until recently taken a back seat to other projects. But after the completion of the Turner manuscript, which took six years, an unusual approach to photography took its place on Parks' daily schedule.

"When you finish a book, you fall into a black hole," Parks notes, with resignation in his voice. His lengthy visual encounter with the delicacy of Turner's palette haunted him, eventually providing the ladder out of that hole. Parks, who also finds time to paint, had been itching to use a particularly fine watercolor brush, "a gift from a friend." At the same time, he found himself drawn to fragments of the natural world: flowers, leaves, twigs, fish skeletons, bleached bones, shells, rocks. He also found time to identify and annotate "at least eight quite different qualities of natural light" that manifest themselves dependably in his living room, whose 10th-story corner view, just north of the United Nations building, offers a vista that sweeps east to Brooklyn, across the Hudson River, and south to downtown.

He began playing with the little objects that were intriguing him and soon started creating small watercolor paintings to serve as their backdrops and settings. These delicate paintings are not meant to function independently; Parks designs each one as a setting for the piece of nature with which it is combined. Sometimes the painting stands behind the object; sometimes it lies flat, with the object set upon it; and sometimes a somewhat more elaborate structure is developed.

Parks then sets the arrangement in place. Over the course of the next few days, the quality of light he has envisioned for that piece invariably illumines it. Working with his 35nun camera and a closeup lens, Parks searches the minuscule aggregate of shapes, forms, tones and hues much as a traditional landscape photographer would do in the natural world, eventually finding the precise vantage point from which to photograph it.

Timing is of the essence. Not only does the light shift and change, but so does his vegetative subject matter. Parks points to a photograph of a brown and green leaf with a yellow stripe and recalls, "A day later that leaf was all brown." This process may seem merely an idiosyncratic version of still-life photography, but with these images Parks has rendered "soulscapes" - projections of and windows into the psyches of both the artist and the viewer.

Translating these "mini-landscapes" through the camera renders the scale of the objects-and watercolors indecipherable. The painted elements and the scraps of nature blend and intertwine subtly enough that the enchanted mind forgets what the eye is actually seeing. Mountains rise in the distance, deserts stretch before you, beaches beckon. Day breaks, twilight lingers, night falls. And the evershifting nuances of light suggest a wide variety of locales - the Caribbean, the U.S. Southwest, the Middle East among them - and all four seasons. "People are always asking me where I went to make this one or that one," Parks says, chuckling. "They have a hard time accepting the fact that the answer is always the same: right here."

Though this project originated just last year, it's well under way; Parks already has produced close to 150 of these images. A museum show concentrating on them is contemplated, and some of them will undoubtedly be integrated into the traveling retrospective organized several years ago by the Ulrich Museum of Wichita State University in Kansas (where Parks was born and raised). A book devoted to them is under consideration by several publishers, and Parks is developing a slide-show version, for which he's composing the accompanying music.

Parks has other irons in the fire. A limited edition of original photographic prints of a recent commission, a pensive study of a young cellist and a woman, have been donated to the Urban League; they will be sold to raise funds for the league's work. Exhibitions, concerts and film screenings, here and abroad, are in the works. A retrospective monograph on his photography is also in the planning stage. (Surprisingly, there's nothing of the sort available in English.) And Parks is hoping that the Turner book will be bought by Hollywood and that he'll be allowed to direct the film version.