Gordon Parks Research Paper
Breaking all the rules
Sunday, March 26, 2006
By LAWRENCE AARON
PHOTOGRAPHER Gordon Parks once explained the complications of his birth this way: "I was born dead."
Gordon was his mother's 15th child. His survival as a newborn was miraculous. The doctor gave him up for dead, but an assistant asked if he could try his hand at getting the child to breathe. The family collected all the ice they could find and surrounded the newborn with an ice bath. Voila! Instant life.
Every day after that was a gift.
From his first breath Gordon Parks broke all the rules.
Born to a family of poor Kansas farmers pummeled by poverty even before the official start of the Depression, Parks found himself out on his own at 15
after …show more content…
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The early hardship infused sensitivity into the photography projects his later reputation would be built on.
His natural gift for music and his tenacity gave him the means to survive rootless street life. The talent he developed pounding piano keys and creating music to woo by in a St. Paul bordello was later honed to a fine point in disciplined classical music compositions.
Gordon Parks was an original, a jack of all trades artistically and master of all. Throughout his whole life you see chapters opening and closing from his dramatic birth in Fort Scott, Kan., on Nov. 30, 1912, to his death March
7 in a well-appointed New York apartment and burial 10 days ago back in
Kansas.
With a life like a film script in which the lead character faces one challenge after the other in a career full of dramatic conflict, the hero is a driven man, his adventures unfolding as he pursues his quest to document the human condition with art.
Ultimately Parks used photography to fuel his escape from mundane jobs cleaning a pool hall or serving food aboard transcontinental railway cars.
He defied popular conventions about the kind of labor African-Americans …show more content…
A mass of creative contradictions, he was a high school dropout who wrote 12 books, novels, poetry collections and music. Equally at home in the fashion houses of Paris and the slums of New York, Chicago and Brazil, he captured his subjects with unique sensitivity. Life magazine loved his work and sent him to the Paris bureau. Parks' wife and three kids went with him.
"I needed Paris," he said in his autobiography. "It was a feast, a grand carnival of imagery, and immediately everything good there seemed to offer sublimation to those inner desires that had for so long been hampered by racism back in America. For the first time in my life I was relaxing from tension and pressure ... Slowly, a curtain was dropping between me and those soiled years."
With his images in the pages of Life during the mid-1950s, Gordon Parks was one of several news photographers to capture the miserable circumstances fueling the anger of African-Americans about their fate and future.
The photos made outsiders appreciate the social problems that go along with being black in America. The stark reality eluded those not
Sunday, March 26, 2006
By LAWRENCE AARON
PHOTOGRAPHER Gordon Parks once explained the complications of his birth this way: "I was born dead."
Gordon was his mother's 15th child. His survival as a newborn was miraculous. The doctor gave him up for dead, but an assistant asked if he could try his hand at getting the child to breathe. The family collected all the ice they could find and surrounded the newborn with an ice bath. Voila! Instant life.
Every day after that was a gift.
From his first breath Gordon Parks broke all the rules.
Born to a family of poor Kansas farmers pummeled by poverty even before the official start of the Depression, Parks found himself out on his own at 15
after …show more content…
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The early hardship infused sensitivity into the photography projects his later reputation would be built on.
His natural gift for music and his tenacity gave him the means to survive rootless street life. The talent he developed pounding piano keys and creating music to woo by in a St. Paul bordello was later honed to a fine point in disciplined classical music compositions.
Gordon Parks was an original, a jack of all trades artistically and master of all. Throughout his whole life you see chapters opening and closing from his dramatic birth in Fort Scott, Kan., on Nov. 30, 1912, to his death March
7 in a well-appointed New York apartment and burial 10 days ago back in
Kansas.
With a life like a film script in which the lead character faces one challenge after the other in a career full of dramatic conflict, the hero is a driven man, his adventures unfolding as he pursues his quest to document the human condition with art.
Ultimately Parks used photography to fuel his escape from mundane jobs cleaning a pool hall or serving food aboard transcontinental railway cars.
He defied popular conventions about the kind of labor African-Americans …show more content…
A mass of creative contradictions, he was a high school dropout who wrote 12 books, novels, poetry collections and music. Equally at home in the fashion houses of Paris and the slums of New York, Chicago and Brazil, he captured his subjects with unique sensitivity. Life magazine loved his work and sent him to the Paris bureau. Parks' wife and three kids went with him.
"I needed Paris," he said in his autobiography. "It was a feast, a grand carnival of imagery, and immediately everything good there seemed to offer sublimation to those inner desires that had for so long been hampered by racism back in America. For the first time in my life I was relaxing from tension and pressure ... Slowly, a curtain was dropping between me and those soiled years."
With his images in the pages of Life during the mid-1950s, Gordon Parks was one of several news photographers to capture the miserable circumstances fueling the anger of African-Americans about their fate and future.
The photos made outsiders appreciate the social problems that go along with being black in America. The stark reality eluded those not