Gordon Parks, 1912-2006, Photographer Documented Poverty’s Toll
from the LA Times
Gordon Parks, who became the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine in the late 1940s and broke more ground in Hollywood two decades later as the first black person to direct a major studio film, “The Learning Tree,” followed by the landmark black private eye movie “Shaft,” has died. He was 93.
Parks, who also carved out niches as a novelist, memoirist, poet and composer, died Tuesday in New York, his nephew, Charles Parks, told The Times. Parks had been in failing health for some time, but the cause of death was not reported.
Although his films widened his fame, it was as a photographer and social documentarian that Parks first made his mark as an artist and achieved his greatest acclaim.
From a clapboard house in a segregated town in rural Kansas to a high-rise Manhattan apartment with a panoramic view of the East River, he covered a lot of ground on his way to becoming one of America’s foremost photojournalists.
Parks, who once played piano in a Minneapolis brothel and worked as a waiter on a railroad dining car, was a self-taught photographer. He was equally at ease documenting a chain gang in Alabama and photographing Manhattan socialite Gloria Vanderbilt or a Paris fashion model.
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