My journey ends here...
PARKS Gordon
Born Gordon Roger Alexander Buchannan Parks.
Date of birth : November 30, 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas.
Date of death : March 7, 2006, New York.
;
;
,
).
Story
His parents were Andrew Jackson Parks (1859, Tennessee-May 18, 1940) and Sarah A. Ross (1868-May 9, 1928).
He was their last child.
His father was a farmer who grew cereals and vegetables, and animals.
He attended a segregated elementary school. The town was too small to afford a separate high school that would facilitate segregation of the secondary school, but blacks were not allowed to play sports or attend school social activities, and they discouraged from developing any aspirations for higher education.
In 1923, aged 11, 3 white boys threw him into the Marmaton River, knowing he couldn't swim. He had the presence of mind to duck underwater so they wouldn't see him make it to land.
In 1926, at age of 14, his mother died. He was sent to live with relatives. This situation ended with him being turned out onto the street to fend for himself.
His first job was as a piano player in a brothel when he was a teenager. He also performed as a jazz pianist. His song "No Love", composed in another brothel, was performed during a national radio broadcast by Larry Funk and his orchestra in the early 1930s.
In 1929 he briefly worked in a gentlemen's club, the Minnesota Club. There he was able to observe the trappings of success, and was able to read many books from the club library. When the club closed because of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, he went to Chicago and managed to land a job in a flophouse.
In 1933, he married Sally Alvis (December 5, 1910, Canada-March 14, 2010) in Minneapolis.
She was model and hat designer (
,
,
). They divorced in 1961.
Together they had 3 children : Gordon Jr (December 7, 1934, Minneapolis-April 3, 1979, Kenya, of a plane
crash)(
). David Michael (March 4, 1944, Minnesota)(
), and Toni Stefani(November 4, 1940, Minnesota-24 août 2015, Angleterre)(
).At age 25, strucked by pictures of migrant workers in a magazine, he bought his first camera in Seattle.
The photography clerk who developed his first roll of film, applauded his work and prompted him to seek a fashion assignment at a women's clothing store in St Paul, Minnesota.
Those pictures caught the eye of Marva Louis, the elegant wife of boxing champion Joe Louis. She encouraged him to move to Chicago in 1940 where he began a portrait business and specialized in photographs of society women. His photographic work in Chicago led him to receive the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, which contributed to being asked to join the Farm Security Administration (FSA).
Over the next few years he moved from job to job, developing a freelance portrait and fashion photographer sideline.
Working as a trainee under Roy Stryker, who ran the photo section fo the FSA, he created one of his
best-known photographs, American Gothic, Washington DC (
). The picture
shows a black woman Ella Watson, who worked on the cleaning crew of the
FSA building, standing stiffly in front of an American flag hanging on
the wall, a broom in one hand and a mop in the background.He had been inspired to create the image after encountering racism repeatedly in restaurants and shops in the segregated capital city.
Upon viewing the picture, Stryker urged Parks to keep working with Watson, which led to a series of pictures of
her daily life (
).Parks remained in Washington DC as a correspondent with the Office of War Information. But disgusted with the prejudice he encountered, he resigned in 1944.
He moved to Harlem and became a freelance fashion photographer for Vogue magazine. He later followed Stryker to the Standard Oil Photography Project in New Jersey, which assigned photograaphers to take pictures of small towns and industrial centers. The most striking work by Parks during this period included Dinner Time at
Mr Hercules Brown's Home, Somerville, Maine (1944) (
), Grease Plant Worker, Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania (1946)(
), Car Loaded with Furniture on Highway (1945), and Ferry Commuters, StatenIsland, NY (1946)(
).He renewed his search for photography jobs in the fashion world. Despite racist attitudes of the day, the Vogue editor, Alexander Liberman, hired him to shoot a collection of evening gowns. He worked for Vogue for the next few years. During this time he published his first two books "Flash Photography" (1947) and "Camera Portraits : Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture" (1948).
In 1948, photographic essay on a young Harlem gang leader won Parks a staff job as a photographer and writer
with Life magazine (
).For 20 years, he produced photographs on subjects including fashion, sports, Broadway, poverty and racial
segragation, as well as portraits of Malcolm X (Parks will be Malcolm's daughter godfather)(
),Stokely Carmichael (
) and Muhammad Ali (
).In the 1950' he worked as a consultant in various Hollywood productions. With his film adaptation of his
autobiographical novel, "The Learning Tree" in 1969 (
), he became Hollywood's first major black director. In 1962 he married Elizabeth Campbell (
); they divorced in 1973. They had a daughter, Leslie(September 1, 1962)(
,
,
).In 1962 he first met Chinese-American editor Genevieve Young (1930, Switzerland-February 18, 2020, New
York)(
,
), when he began writing "The Learning Tree".They become romantically involved at a time when they both were divorcing, and married in 1973.
They divorced in 1979.
For many years he was romantically involved with Gloria Vanderbilt, the railroad heiress and designer.
Their relation evolved in a deep friendship that endured throughout his lifetime (
,
)..In 1971 he directed a detective film "Shaft" which became a major hit that spawned a series of films that would be labeled as blaxploitation.
In the 1980', he made several films for television.
He died aged 93 in Manhattan, in 2006.
Link with Marilyn
He took her in pictures in March 1956 in the house of North Beverly Glen Boulevard, during the shooting of "Bus Stop".
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