Gordon Parks
Renaissance Man
It's hard to know where to begin when praising someone like Gordon Parks.
He's widely considered one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, in addition to his fiction and nonfiction writing, musical composition, filmmaking, and painting.
His writing career produced novels, poetry, three memoirs, and non-fiction, including photographic instructional manuals and books about filmmaking.
He was awarded over 50 honorary doctorates throughout his lifetime.
His work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, International Center of Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Saint Louis Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts just to name a few.
His 1948 photo essay on the life of a Harlem gang leader won him widespread acclaim and a position as the first African American staff photographer for Life magazine.
He was the first African American to direct a major motion picture, The Learning Tree (1969), for a Hollywood studio.
He helped to found Essence magazine in 1970 and served as editorial director for its first three years of publication.
He helped usher in the wave of what came to be crudely known as "blaxploitation" films with his second film, Shaft (1971).
He continued to evolve as an artist until his death in 2006 at the age of 93; including producing, directing, and composing the music for a ballet, Martin, dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you didn't feel like you were slacking already, Mr. Banks will certainly make you question whether or not you’re working on your craft enough.
Gordon Banks did all of this as a black man in a country that by and large hated and feared black men and did everything it could to stop them from feeling like citizens let alone be successful. I want to focus on the man, his art, and his achievements but make no mistake about it, the things he achieved seem impossible for even a wealthy, white artist.
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born on November 30, 1912 on his father's farm in Fort Scott, Kansas. After his mother's death when he was fourteen he was sent to live with his sister and her husband in St. Paul, Minnesota but his constant arguing with his brother-in-law saw him on the streets by the age of fifteen. He worked as a singer, piano player, bus boy, traveling waiter, and semi-pro basketball player before boarding a train to Chicago after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
There he purchased a used Voigtländer Brillant camera and began teaching himself photography, eventually making a name for himself as a glamour photographer and later as one of the most important photo journalists of the civil rights era. This work coupled with his writings on filmmaking led him to consulting for production companies and eventually becoming a filmmaker himself.
So for the first day of Black History Month, I'm celebrating a man who constantly overcame the odds to make a life for himself and create his art and share it with the world. If great art shows us what it's like to be someone else and feel their joy and pain then Gordon Parks is one of the greatest artists of all time in my opinion.
