Legacy MattersWhen I was a young girl, I eagerly waited for the new Life magazine to come out when I could become entranced with the photographs, falling deep into their mystery.
Gordon Parks was one reason why. His death at 93 leaves behind a Great Legacy of photographs from around the world.
He helped me understand the spirit of the civil rights movement .
From the Washington Post obituary by Wil Haygood, "A Conscience with a Lens"
in 1942 he aimed his camera at a woman no one had heard of by the name of Ella Watson. She was a cleaning lady with a thin, haunted face. She was poor as nickels. Parks once said the photograph said as much as a picture of a cross burning.
From the NY Times obituary by Andy Grundberg, "A Master of the Camera."
Mr. Parks's years as a contributor to Life, the largest-circulation picture magazine of its day, lasted from 1948 to 1972, and it cemented his reputation as a humanitarian photojournalist and as an artist with an eye for elegance.
Elegant and cool, he took fashion images and portraits of the famous, wrote his memoirs and directed movies. Richard Roundtree, the star of "Shaft" said "There's no one cooler than Gordon Parks".
His obituary from the Associated Pres by Polly Anderson quotes some of his wisest words.
"I think most people can do a whole awful lot more if they just try," Parks told The Associated Press in 2000. "They just don't have the confidence that they can write a novel or they can write poetry or they can take pictures or paint or whatever, and so they don't do it, and they leave the planet dissatisfied with themselves."
Largely self-taught, Gordon Parks tried everything and we are the beneficiaries of his work.
When asked why he undertook so many professions, Parks told Black Enterprise "At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it. I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand
He gave some 227 photographs to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. He donated the rest of his archives and memorabilia to the Library of Congress. "I wanted it all stored under one roof and a roof I could respect."
In 1998, when an exhibit of his work began traveling around the U.S. called Half Past Autumn, he told Phil Ponce from the NewsHour on PBS.
I feel at 85, I really feel that I'm just ready to start. There's another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone else will take it further on, you know. You discover it. Somebody else takes it on. But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.
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Posted by Jill Fallon at March 9, 2006 2:40 PM | Permalink