Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks' career was defined by unyielding opposition to racism and all forms of social injustice, channeled at different points in his life through the vehicles of photography, film, writing, and musical composition. Born in 1912 in a black family in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks experienced firsthand the hardships of racial segregation and discrimination. A self-taught photographer, Parks' early work earned him a fellowship with the Farm Security Administration. From this position, he challenged racism through his photographs, bringing the stark reality of the daily life of African Americans to a nationwide audience. In 1944 Parks resigned from government work, due to repeated encounters with institutionalized discrimination. He became a fashion photographer, but continued to confront racism throughout all of his work, particularly in a series of portraits for Life magazine. In these portraits, Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X looked out defiantly at a nation that could no longer ignore the injustices of the past. Parks extended the reach of his artistic discourse to film, moving from an adaptation of his autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree, to the work for which he is perhaps best known today: Shaft. This 1971 film about a cool black private eye came out in the same year as Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Together, these films defined the blaxploitation genre, with its at times contradictory mix of concern for racial issues and perpetuation of racial stereotypes. A sequel to Shaft and a documentary on Leadbelly followed, as well as novels, memoirs and poems, and a ballet tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. Gordon Parks died in 2006, his passion for social justice untamed to the last.
