That was what drove me into it to expose something to the public that I felt was being hidden.

It's kind of insane all the things Gordon Parks did in his life.

He was a poet, a novelist, a jazz pianist, a classical composer.

He co founded essence magazine and served as its editorial director for its first three years.

In 1969 he became the first black director of a major Hollywood movie called The Learning Tree, which was based on a semi autobiographical book that he wrote and for which he adapted the screenplay and composed the score.

He also directed shaft, a huge commercial hit that helped to spawn the blaxploitation genre and helped to save MGM and the larger studio system from bankruptcy.

All that would be enough for 10 lives.

But it leaves out Parks his greatest contribution to american art in the 20th century.

His photography.

One day I saw a newsreel of the bombing of the american gunship called right after that the intercom boomed here is norman alley.

The man who shot this wonderful.

I never forgot that.

And when I got to Seattle Washington, I had about $12.50 and I went right into a pawn shop and bought myself a camera at 25.

Parks picked up of white lander, brilliant his first camera and taught himself how to take photos with it.

Three years later he was an official photographer for the town and country department store in ST paul Minnesota.

He worked for local newspapers and began to document life on the south side of Chicago, for which he won the Rosenwald Fellowship.

All that attention landed him a job at the Farm Security Administration, a New deal government project that involved documenting poor rural workers to generate political support for government aid.

In the F.

S.

A.

Parks took what would become his most famous picture.

Told me her name was Ella Watson and I asked her if I could photograph her.

I had really thought of Grant Woods picture of the american Gothic.

I put a broom in one hand and a mop on the other and told her look directly into the camera.

American Gothic shows that Parks knew the power of iconography, how juxtapositions and comparisons can make a statement that sticks in the mind.

In fact, the head of the FSA Roy stryker felt that the statement of american Gothic may have been too strong.

He said, well you're getting the idea, but you're going to get us all fired.

Said this is the government agency.

And that picture is an indictment against America.

Parks learned that the camera could be a powerful tool.

It forced people to see the cruelties in their own society, which is important when so often what allows those cruelties to persist is people's determination not to see them.

The bluntness of american Gothic is the reason for its power, but in his autobiography Parks called the photo Unsubtle as he became a more experienced photographer, he learned how to capture a more nuanced vision of the America he saw without losing any of american Gothic six moral force.

In 1948 Park shot the photo essay that landed him a position at Life magazine as their first ever black staff photographer.

The essay followed Red Jackson, a 17 year old leader of a Harlem gang called the midtown Urz.

The lead photo features red hiding out in an abandoned building, trapped there by a rival gang on the street below.

It's a stark image highly dramatic in its chiaroscuro lighting Red is shrouded in darkness, peering through a window of shattered glass.

You can feel his isolation behind him is shadow in front of him the world, but the light is no safer for red than the darkness in both directions.

He's in danger of disappearing.

A few photos Later, we learned that red was coming from the funeral of a buddy, a 15 year old named Maurice who the police found on a Harlem sidewalk and decided Had died accidentally.

As red and his friends leave the chapel.

They get ambushed and forced into that abandoned building.

They escape unharmed.

But the following night, the two gangs brawl, Harlem gang leader shows the stressful and exhausting reality for Harlem youth in the late 40s.

But Parks isn't documenting that world like some kind of anthropologist, his portrait of Harlem is an intimate one earned by spending time with Red in his community, you get the full effect of this intimacy.

When you look at the photos that life chose not to include in the essay.

Red's life is more than just violence.

These are kids trying to be kids, but forced to navigate circumstances they can't control and don't deserve.

I pointed my camera people mostly who needed someone to say something for them who couldn't speak for themselves.

In 1956, parks went to Alabama to document segregation in the south.

The pictures he captured there are some of his most iconic and most moving lovecraft country on HBO paid homage to a few in its season premiere and that speaks to their enduring power.

A more mature photographer at this point, Parks is able to record the monstrousness of racism in quotidian reality in moments of quiet dignity by people who refuse to be dehumanized even as forces that deny their dignity and their humanity literally hanging over their heads.

In so many of parks's photographs, his lens has a profound empathy, a friendliness you can't help but to identify with his subjects and once you do that, you're implicated.

His pictures in their gentleness become persuasive acts of protest, showing many in America what they had never seen or what they had seen, but refused to acknowledge for this reason and more their magnificent and important works of art from an artist who has no shortage of them.

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